Molecular Gas Structures traced by $^{13}$CO Emission in the 18,190 $^{12}$CO Molecular Clouds from the MWISP Survey
Abstract
After the morphological classification of the 18,190 CO molecular clouds, we further investigate the properties of their internal molecular gas structures traced by the CO( 10) line emissions. Using three different methods to extract the CO gas structures within each CO cloud, we find that 15 of CO clouds (2851) have CO gas structures and these CO clouds contribute about 93 of the total integrated flux of CO emission. In each of 2851 CO clouds with CO gas structures, the CO emission area generally does not exceed 70 of the CO emission area, and the CO integrated flux does not exceed 20 of the CO integrated flux. We reveal a strong correlation between the velocity-integrated intensities of CO lines and those of CO lines in both CO and CO emission regions. This indicates the H column densities of molecular clouds are crucial for the CO lines emission. After linking the CO structure detection rates of the 18,190 CO molecular clouds to their morphologies, i.e. nonfilaments and filaments, we find that the CO gas structures are primarily detected in the CO clouds with filamentary morphologies. Moreover, these filaments tend to harbor more than one CO structure. That demonstrates filaments not only have larger spatial scales, but also have more molecular gas structures traced by CO lines, i.e. the local gas density enhancements. Our results favor the turbulent compression scenario for filament formation, in which dynamical compression of turbulent flows induces the local density enhancements. The nonfilaments tend to be in the low-pressure and quiescent turbulent environments of the diffuse interstellar medium.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2205.14858,
title = {Molecular Gas Structures traced by $^{13}$CO Emission in the 18,190 $^{12}$CO Molecular Clouds from the MWISP Survey},
author = {Lixia Yuan and Ji Yang and Fujun Du and Yang Su and Xunchuan Liu and Shaobo Zhang and Yan Sun and Xin Zhou and Qing-Zeng Yan and Yuehui Ma},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.14858},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
21 pages, 14 Figures; Appendix (17 pages, 19 Figures); Accepted for publication in the journal ApJS