The SEDIGISM survey: molecular clouds in the inner galaxy

Duarte Cabral, Ana ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5259-4774, Colombo, D., Urquhart, J. S., Ginsburg, A., Russeil, D., Schuller, F., Anderson, L. D., Barnes, P. J., Beltrán, M. T., Beuther, H., Bontemps, S., Bronfman, L., Csengeri, T., Dobbs, C. L., Eden, D., Giannetti, A., Kauffmann, J., Mattern, M., Medina, S.-N. X., Menten, K. M., Lee, M.-Y., Pettitt, A. R., Riener, M., Rigby, A. J., Traficante, A., Veena, V. S., Wienen, M., Wyrowski, F., Agurto, C., Azagra, F., Cesaroni, R., Finger, R., Gonzalez, E., Henning, T., Hernandez, A. K., Kainulainen, J., Leurini, S., Lopez, S., Mac-Auliffe, F., Mazumdar, P., Molinari, S., Motte, F., Muller, E., Nguyen-Luong, Q., Parra, R., Perez-Beaupuits, J.-P., Montenegro-Montes, F. M., Moore, T. J. T., Ragan, S. E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4164-5588, Sánchez-Monge, A., Sanna, A., Schilke, P., Schisano, E., Schneider, N., Suri, S., Testi, L., Torstensson, K., Venegas, P. and Zavagno, A. 2021. The SEDIGISM survey: molecular clouds in the inner galaxy. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 500 (3) , pp. 3027-3049. 10.1093/mnras/staa2480

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Abstract

We use the13CO (2-1) emission from the SEDIGISM (Structure, Excitation, and Dynam-ics of the Inner Galactic InterStellar Medium) high-resolution spectral-line survey of the innerGalaxy, to extract the molecular cloud population with a large dynamic range in spatial scales,using the Spectral Clustering for Interstellar Molecular Emission Segmentation (scimes) algo-rithm. This work compiles a cloud catalogue with a total of 10663 molecular clouds, 10300 ofwhich we were able to assign distances and compute physical properties. We study some of theglobal properties of clouds using a science sample, consisting of 6664 well resolved sourcesand for which the distance estimates are reliable. In particular, we compare the scaling relationsretrieved from SEDIGISM to those of other surveys, and we explore the properties of cloudswith and without high-mass star formation. Our results suggest that there is no single globalproperty of a cloud that determines its ability to form massive stars, although we find combinedtrends of increasing mass, size, surface density and velocity dispersion for the sub-sample ofclouds with ongoing high-mass star formation. We then isolate the most extreme clouds in theSEDIGISM sample (i.e. clouds in the tails of the distributions) to look at their overall Galacticdistribution, in search for hints of environmental effects. We find that, for most properties,the Galactic distribution of the most extreme clouds is only marginally different to that of theglobal cloud population. The Galactic distribution of the largest clouds, the turbulent cloudsand the high-mass star-forming clouds are those that deviate most significantly from the globalcloud population. We also find that the least dynamically active clouds (with low velocitydispersion or low virial parameter) are situated further afield, mostly in the least populatedareas. However, we suspect that part of these trends may be affected by some observationalbiases (such as completeness and survey limitations), and thus require further follow up workin order to be confirmed.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Physics and Astronomy
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0035-8711
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	13 August 2020
Date of Acceptance:	22 May 2020
Last Modified:	25 Oct 2024 15:31
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/134198

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