A Morphological Classification of 18190 Molecular Clouds Identified in $^{12}$CO Data from the MWISP Survey
Abstract
We attempt to visually classify the morphologies of 18190 molecular clouds, which are identified in the CO(1-0) spectral line data over 450 deg of the second Galactic quadrant from the Milky Way Imaging Scroll Painting project (MWISP). Using the velocity-integrated intensity maps of the CO(1-0) emission, molecular clouds are first divided into unresolved and resolved ones. The resolved clouds are further classified as non-filaments or filaments. Among the 18190 molecular clouds, 25 are unresolved, 64 are non-filaments, and 11 are filaments. In the terms of the integrated flux of CO(1-0) spectra of the whole 18190 molecular clouds, 90 are from filaments, 9 are from non-filaments, and the rest 1 are from unresolved sources. Although non-filaments are dominant in the number of the discrete molecular clouds, filaments are the main contributor of CO emission flux. We also present the number distributions of physical parameters of the molecular clouds in our catalog, including their angular sizes, velocity spans, peak intensities of CO(1-0) emission, and CO(1-0) total fluxes. We find that there is a systematic difference between the angular sizes of the non-filaments and filaments, with the filaments tending to have larger angular scales. The H column densities of them are not significantly different. We also discuss the observational effects, such as those induced by the finite spatial resolution, beam dilution and line-of-sight projection, on the morphological classification of molecular clouds in our sample.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2108.12110,
title = {A Morphological Classification of 18190 Molecular Clouds Identified in $^{12}$CO Data from the MWISP Survey},
author = {Lixia Yuan and Ji Yang and Fujun Du and Xunchuan Liu and Shaobo Zhang and Zehao Lin and Jingfei Sun and Qing-Zeng Yan and Yuehui Ma and Yang Su and Yan Sun and Xin Zhou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.12110},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
17 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, appendix: 7 figures, accepted for publication in ApJS