English

A Morphological Classification of 18190 Molecular Clouds Identified in $^{12}$CO Data from the MWISP Survey

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2021-12-08 v2 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

We attempt to visually classify the morphologies of 18190 molecular clouds, which are identified in the 12^{12}CO(1-0) spectral line data over \sim 450 deg2^{2} of the second Galactic quadrant from the Milky Way Imaging Scroll Painting project (MWISP). Using the velocity-integrated intensity maps of the 12^{12}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, \sim 25 %\% are unresolved, \sim 64%\% are non-filaments, and \sim 11%\% are filaments. In the terms of the integrated flux of 12^{12}CO(1-0) spectra of the whole 18190 molecular clouds, \sim 90%\% are from filaments, \sim 9%\% are from non-filaments, and the rest \sim 1%\% are from unresolved sources. Although non-filaments are dominant in the number of the discrete molecular clouds, filaments are the main contributor of 12^{12}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 12^{12}CO(1-0) emission, and 12^{12}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 H2_{2} 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