English

The spatial correlation between CN line and dust continuum emitting regions in high-mass star-forming cloud

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2024-10-07 v2

Abstract

Measuring the strength of three dimensional (3D) magnetic field vector is challenging as it is not easy to recognize whether its line-of-sight (LOS) and plane-of-sky (POS) components are obtained from the same region. CN (N=10N = 1 - 0) emission has been used to get the LOS component of a magnetic field (BLOS_\mathrm{LOS}) from its Zeeman splitting lines, while dust continuum emission has been used to get the POS component of a magnetic field (BPOS_\mathrm{POS}). We use the CN (N=10N = 1 - 0) data observed with the Taeduk Radio Astronomy Observatory (TRAO) 14-m telescope and the dust continuum data from HerschelHerschel archive toward six high-mass star-forming regions in order to test whether CN line and dust continuum emission can trace a similar region and thus can be used for inferring 3D magnetic field strength. Our comparison between CN and H2_2 column densities for all targets indicates that CN line emission tends to be strong toward bright continuum regions. The positions of peak CN column densities are particularly well correlated with those of peak H2_2 column densities at least over the H2_2 column density of 8.0 ×\times 1022^{22} cm2^{-2} within one or two telescope beam size in all targets, implying that CN line and dust continuum emitting regions are likely spatially coincident. This enabled us to make the reliable measurement of 3D magnetic field strengths of five targets by taking a vector sum of their BLOS_\mathrm{LOS} and BPOS_\mathrm{POS}, helping to decide the magnetical criticality of the targets as supercritical or transcritical.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.10506,
  title  = {The spatial correlation between CN line and dust continuum emitting regions in high-mass star-forming cloud},
  author = {Jihye Hwang and Chang Won Lee and Jongsoo Kim and Eun Jung Chung and Kee-Tae Kim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.10506},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted in ApJ, 14th Aug 2024