Related papers: VolDen: a tool to extract number density from the …
The interstellar medium (ISM) exhibits complex, multi-scale structures that are challenging to study due to their projection into two-dimensional (2D) column density maps. We present the Volume Density Mapper, a novel algorithm based on…
Constraining the physical and chemical evolution of molecular clouds is essential to our understanding of star formation. These investigations often necessitate knowledge of some local representative number density of the gas along the line…
We present RadFil, a publicly available Python package that gives users full control over how to build and fit radial density profiles for interstellar filaments. RadFil builds filament profiles by taking radial cuts across the spine of a…
Volume density is a key physical quantity controlling the evolution of the interstellar medium (ISM) and star formation, but it cannot be accessed directly by observations of molecular clouds. We aim at estimating the volume density…
We propose a simple analytical method for estimating the central volume density of prestellar molecular cloud cores from their column density profiles. Prestellar cores feature a flat central part of the column density and volume density…
We present a geometry-independent method for determining the shapes of radial volume density profiles of astronomical objects whose geometries are unknown, based on a single column density map. Such profiles are often critical to understand…
Sub-millimetre dust emission is often used to derive the column density N of dense interstellar clouds. The observations consist of data at several wavelengths but of variable resolution. We examine two procedures that been proposed for the…
Measuring the mass distribution of infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) over the wide dynamic range of their column densities is a fundamental obstacle in determining the initial conditions of high-mass star formation and star cluster formation. We…
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…
We present a number of statistical tools for obtaining studying turbulence in molecular clouds and diffuse interstellar medium. For our tests we used of three-dimensional 512 cube compressible MHD isothermal simulations performed for…
Large-scale gaseous filaments with length up to the order of 100 pc are on the upper end of the filamentary hierarchy of the Galactic interstellar medium. Their association with respect to the Galactic structure and their role in Galactic…
Recent submillimeter and far-infrared wavelength observations of absorption in the rotational ground-state lines of various simple molecules against distant Galactic continuum sources have opened the possibility of studying the chemistry of…
Sub-millimetre observations suggest that the filaments of interstellar clouds have rather uniform widths and can be described with the so-called Plummer profiles. The shapes of the filament profiles are linked to their physical state.…
[Abridged] Molecular filaments have received special attention recently, thanks to new observational results on their properties. In particular, our early analysis of filament properties revealed a narrow distribution of median widths…
Context. Filamentary structures appear to be ubiquitous in the interstellar medium. Being able to detect and characterize them is the first step toward understanding their origin, their evolution, and their role in the Galactic cycle of…
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…
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…
Sub-millimetre dust emission is an important tracer of density N of dense interstellar clouds. One has to combine surface brightness information at different spatial resolutions, and specific methods are needed to derive N at a resolution…
This paper considers \emph{volume minimization} (VolMin)-based structured matrix factorization (SMF). VolMin is a factorization criterion that decomposes a given data matrix into a basis matrix times a structured coefficient matrix via…
Star formation in molecular clouds is intimately linked to their internal mass distribution. We present an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the column density structure of a high-mass, filamentary molecular cloud, namely IRDC…