English

Whole-disk sampling of molecular clouds in M83

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2024-10-10 v1

Abstract

We present a catalog of clouds identified from the 12^{12}CO (1--0) data of M83, which was observed using Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) with a spatial resolution of \sim46 pc and a mass sensitivity of \sim104^4 MM_{\odot} (3 σ\sigma). The almost full-disk coverage and high sensitivity of the data allowed us to sample 5724 molecular clouds with a median mass of 1.9\sim1.9 ×\times 10510^5 MM_{\odot}, which is comparable to the most frequently sampled mass of Giant Molecular Clouds by surveys in the Milky Way. About 60 percent of the total CO luminosity in M83's disk arises from clouds more massive than 106^6 MM_{\odot}. Such massive clouds comprise 16 percent of the total clouds in number and tend to concentrate toward the arm, bar, and center, while smaller clouds are more prevalent in inter-arm regions. Most >106>10^6 MM_{\odot} clouds have peak brightness temperatures TpeakT_{\mathrm{peak}} above 2 K with the current resolution. Comparing the observed cloud properties with the scaling relations determined by Solomon et al. 1987 (S87), TpeakT_{\mathrm{peak}}>2>2 K clouds follow the relations, but TpeakT_{\mathrm{peak}}<2<2 K clouds, which are dominant in number, deviate significantly. Without considering the effect of beam dilution, the deviations would suggest modestly high virial parameters and low surface mass densities for the entire cloud samples, which are similar to values found for the Milky Way clouds by Rice et al. (2016) and Miville-Desch{\^e}nes et al. (2017). However, once beam dilution is taken into account, the observed αvir\alpha_{\mathrm{vir}} and Σ\Sigma for a majority of the clouds (mostly TpeakT_{\mathrm{peak}} <2<2 K) can be potentially explained with intrinsic Σ\Sigma of \sim100 M pc2M_{\mathrm{\odot}}\ \mathrm{pc}^{-2} and αvir\alpha_{\mathrm{vir}} of \sim1, which are similar to the clouds of S87.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.05424,
  title  = {Whole-disk sampling of molecular clouds in M83},
  author = {Akihiko Hirota and Jin Koda and Fumi Egusa and Tsuyoshi Sawada and Kazushi Sakamoto and Mark Heyer and Amanda M Lee and Fumiya Maeda and Samuel Boissier and Daniela Calzetti and Bruce G. Elmegreen and Nanase Harada and Luis C. Ho and Masato I. N. Kobayashi and Nario Kuno and Barry F. Madore and Sergio Martín and Jennifer Donovan Meyer and Kazuyuki Muraoka and Yoshimasa Watanabe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.05424},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:12:01.097Z