Relations Between Molecular Cloud Structure Sizes and Line Widths in the Large Magellanic Cloud
Abstract
We present a comparative study of the size-line width relation for substructures within six molecular clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) mapped with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Our sample extends our previous study, which compared a Planck detected cold cloud in the outskirts of the LMC with the 30 Doradus molecular cloud and found the typical line width for 1 pc radius structures to be 5 times larger in 30 Doradus. By observing clouds with intermediate levels of star formation activity, we find evidence that line width at a given size increases with increasing local and cloud-scale 8m intensity. At the same time, line width at a given size appears to independently correlate with measures of mass surface density. Our results suggest that both virial-like motions due to gravity and local energy injection by star formation feedback play important roles in determining intracloud dynamics.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1905.11827,
title = {Relations Between Molecular Cloud Structure Sizes and Line Widths in the Large Magellanic Cloud},
author = {Tony Wong and Annie Hughes and Kazuki Tokuda and Rémy Indebetouw and Toshikazu Onishi and Jeffrey B. Bandurski and C. -H. Rosie Chen and Yasuo Fukui and Simon C. O. Glover and Ralf S. Klessen and Jorge L. Pineda and Julia Roman-Duval and Marta Sewiło and Evan Wojciechowski and Sarolta Zahorecz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.11827},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
20 pages, to appear in ApJ. Data presented in this paper can be found at https://mmwave.astro.illinois.edu/almalmc/