English

Widespread SiO and CH3OH emission in Filamentary Infrared Dark Clouds

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2017-11-28 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Infrared-Dark Clouds (IRDCs) are cold, dense regions of high (optical and infrared) extinction, believed to be the birthplace of high-mass stars and stellar clusters. The physical mechanisms leading to the formation of these IRDCs are not completely understood and it is thus important to study their molecular gas kinematics and chemical content to search for any signature of the IRDCs formation process. Using the 30m-diameter antenna at the Instituto de Radioastronom\'ia Milim\'etrica, we have obtained emission maps of dense gas tracers (H13^{13}CO+^{+} and HN13^{13}C) and typical shock tracers (SiO and CH3_3OH) toward three IRDCs, G028.37+00.07, G034.43+00.24 and G034.77-00.55 (clouds C, F and G, respectively). We have studied the molecular gas kinematics in these clouds and, consistent with previous works toward other IRDCs, the clouds show complex gas kinematics with several velocity-coherent sub-structures separated in velocity space by a few km s1^{-1}. Correlated with these complex kinematic structures, widespread (parsec-scale) emission of SiO and CH3_3OH is present in all the three clouds. For clouds C and F, known to be actively forming stars, widespread SiO and CH3_3OH is likely associated with on-going star formation activity. However, for cloud G, which lacks either 8 μ\mum or 24 μ\mum sources and 4.5 μ\mum H2_2 shock-excited emission, the detected widespread SiO and CH3_3OH emission may have originated in a large-scale shock interaction, although a scenario involving a population of low-mass stars driving molecular outflows cannot be fully ruled out.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.09679,
  title  = {Widespread SiO and CH3OH emission in Filamentary Infrared Dark Clouds},
  author = {G. Cosentino and I. Jimenez-Serra and J. D. Henshaw and P. Caselli and S. Viti and A. T. Barnes and F. Fontani and J. C. Tan and A. Pon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.09679},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

23 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS