The Structure of an 80 pc Long Massive Filament
Abstract
Using new Institut de Radioastronomie Millim\'etrique (IRAM) 30m telescope , =1-0 and Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope and =2-1 maps together with archival far-infrared continuum data, and , and =1-0 data, we present a comprehensive analysis of the massive filament CFG024.000.48 (G24) across clump-to-cloud scales. Our results show that G24 is an 80 pc giant filament with a total mass of M. In the different tracers the filament width is measured to be about 2 times the beam size of the observations, as expected for power-law density distributions, giving beam-deconvolved widths in the range from 0.8 to 2.8 pc. We determine a line-of-sight thickness of 2.2 pc demonstrating that G24 is not an edge-on, flatten structure. The virial parameter obtained from line mass () from the (1-0) data is 0.85, and that obtained from -based H column density is 0.52, suggesting G24 is globally close to virial equilibrium. The distribution of the 40 dust clumps appears to have a ''two-tier'' fragmentation pattern. For the clump groups, the separation, with a mean/median of 3.68/3.46 pc, is very close to expected length associated with the maximum fragmentation growth rate of pc estimated for the dust. However, the longitudinal centroid velocity profiles of and show oscillation patterns with wavelengths of 9.80.1 pc and 9.90.1 pc, respectively. This is 2 times larger than the corresponding values of of 4.960.63 pc and 4.651.34 pc, respectively. This suggests that the velocity structure is not dominated by flows directly associated with the fragmentation seen in the dust emission.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.13616,
title = {The Structure of an 80 pc Long Massive Filament},
author = {Qian-Ru He and Won-Ju Kim and Gary A. Fuller and Alessio Traficante and Seamus D. Clarke and Yu Gao and Xue-Peng Chen and Min Fang and Ke Wang and En Chen and Tapas Baug and Xiao-Long Wang and Chen Wang and Yong-Xiong Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.13616},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
32 pages, 25 figures. Accepted by AJ