Milky Way molecular clouds from ^12^CO

DOI

This study presents a catalog of 8107 molecular clouds that covers the entire Galactic plane and includes 98% of the ^12^CO emission observed within b+/-5^{deg}^. The catalog was produced using a hierarchical cluster identification method applied to the result of a Gaussian decomposition of the Dame+ (2001ApJ...547..792D) data. The total H_2_ mass in the catalog is 1.2x10^9^M_{sun}, in agreement with previous estimates. We find that 30% of the sight lines intersect only a single cloud, with another 25% intersecting only two clouds. The most probable cloud size is R~30pc. We find that M{propto}R^2.2+/-0.2^, with no correlation between the cloud surface density, {Sigma}, and R. In contrast with the general idea, we find a rather large range of values of {Sigma}, from 2 to 300M{sun}/pc^2^, and a systematic decrease with increasing Galactic radius, R_gal. The cloud velocity dispersion and the normalization {sigma}0={sigma}v/R^1/2^ both decrease systematically with R_gal_. When studied over the whole Galactic disk, there is a large dispersion in the line width-size relation and a significantly better correlation between {sigma}v and {Sigma}R. The normalization of this correlation is constant to better than a factor of two for R_gal_<20kpc. This relation is used to disentangle the ambiguity between near and far kinematic distances. We report a strong variation of the turbulent energy injection rate. In the outer Galaxy it may be maintained by accretion through the disk and/or onto the clouds, but neither source can drive the 100 times higher cloud-averaged injection rate in the inner Galaxy.

Cone search capability for table J/ApJ/834/57/table1 (The molecular clouds catalog)

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.18340057
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/834/57
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/834/57
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/834/57
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/834/57
Provenance
Creator Miville-Deschenes M.-A.; Murray N.; Lee E.J.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2017
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Galactic and extragalactic Astronomy; Interstellar medium; Natural Sciences; Physics