Related papers: Relationship between molecular cloud structure and…
We investigate physical properties of molecular clouds in disc galaxies with different morphology: a galaxy without prominent structure, a spiral barred galaxy and a galaxy with flocculent structure. Our $N$-body/hydrodynamical simulations…
The shape of the probability distribution function (PDF) of molecular clouds is an important ingredient for modern theories of star formation and turbulence. Recently, several studies have pointed out observational difficulties with…
We aim to develop a new method to infer the sub-beam probability density function (PDF) of H2 column densities and the dense gas mass within molecular clouds using spatially unresolved observations of molecular emission lines in the 3 mm…
We study the mass-density relationship n ~ m^x in molecular cloud condensations (clumps), considering various equipartition relations between their gravitational, kinetic, internal and magnetic energies. Clumps are described statistically,…
We present new high resolution and dynamic range dust column density and temperature maps of the California Molecular Cloud derived from a combination of Planck and Herschel dust-emission maps, and 2MASS NIR dust-extinction maps. We used…
We leverage the 1 pc spatial resolution of the Leike et al. 2020 3D dust map to characterize the three-dimensional structure of nearby molecular clouds ($d \lesssim 400$ pc). We start by "skeletonizing" the clouds in 3D volume density space…
Within ten nearby (d < 450 pc) Gould Belt molecular clouds we evaluate statistically the relative orientation between the magnetic field projected on the plane of sky, inferred from the polarized thermal emission of Galactic dust observed…
We conduct numerical experiments to determine the density probability distribution function (PDF) produced in supersonic, isothermal, self-gravitating turbulence of the sort that is ubiquitous in star-forming molecular clouds. Our…
We show that the inter-cloud Larson scaling relation between mean volume density and size $\rho\propto R^{-1}$, which in turn implies that mass $M\propto R^2$, or that the column density $N$ is constant, is an artifact of the observational…
We study the probability distribution function (PDF) of the mass density in simulations of supersonic turbulence with properties appropriate for molecular clouds. For this study we use Athena, a new higher-order Godunov code. We find there…
We use a suite of 3D simulations of star-forming molecular clouds, with and without stellar feedback and magnetic fields, to investigate the effectiveness of different fitting methods for volume and column density probability distribution…
(Abridged) We discuss the probability distribution function (PDF) of column density resulting from density fields with lognormal PDFs, applicable to isothermal gas (e.g., probably molecular clouds). We suggest that a ``decorrelation…
A key parameter to the description of all star formation processes is the density structure of the gas. In this letter, we make use of probability distribution functions (PDFs) of Herschel column density maps of Orion B, Aquila, and…
Simulations generally show that non-self-gravitating clouds have a lognormal column density ($\Sigma$) probability distribution function (PDF), while self-gravitating clouds with active star formation develop a distinct power-law tail at…
We present the first study of the relationship between the column density distribution of molecular clouds within nearby Galactic spiral arms and their evolutionary status as measured from their stellar content. We analyze a sample of 195…
We review the progress that has been made in observing and analyzing molecular cloud structure in recent years. Structures are self-similar over a wide range of scales with similar power law indices independent of the star forming nature of…
We derive an analytic expression for the transitional column density value ($s_t$) between the lognormal and power-law form of the probability distribution function (PDF) in star-forming molecular clouds. Our expression for $s_t$ depends on…
Theoretical and observational investigations have indicated that the abundance of carbon monoxide (CO) is very sensitive to intrinsic properties of the gaseous medium, such as density, metallicity, and the background UV field. In order to…
We aim to better understand how the spatial structure of molecular clouds is governed by turbulence. For that, we study the large-scale spatial distribution of low density molecular gas and search for characteristic length scales. We employ…
We dendrogram the Leike et al. 2020 3D dust map, leveraging its $\sim 1$ pc spatial resolution to produce a uniform catalog of molecular clouds in the solar neighborhood. Using accurate distances, we measure the properties of 65 clouds in…