ALMA obs. of massive clouds in the CMZ

DOI

We report Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Band 6 continuum observations of 2000au resolution toward four massive molecular clouds in the Central Molecular Zone of the Galaxy. To study gas fragmentation, we use the dendrogram method to identify cores as traced by the dust continuum emission. The four clouds exhibit different fragmentation states at the observed resolution despite having similar masses at the cloud scale (~1-5pc). Assuming a constant dust temperature of 20K, we construct core mass functions of the clouds and find a slightly top-heavy shape as compared to the canonical initial mass function, but we note several significant uncertainties that may affect this result. The characteristic spatial separation between the cores as identified by the minimum spanning tree method, ~10^4^au, and the characteristic core mass, 1-7M_{sun}, are consistent with predictions of thermal Jeans fragmentation. The three clouds showing fragmentation may be forming OB associations (stellar mass ~10^3^M{sun}). None of the four clouds under investigation seem to be currently able to form massive star clusters like the Arches and the Quintuplet (>~10^4^M{sun}_), but they may form such clusters by further gas accretion onto the cores.

Cone search capability for table J/ApJ/894/L14/tableb1 (The full core catalog in the three clouds)

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.18949014
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/894/L14
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/894/L14
Related Identifier https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/894/L14
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/894/L14
Provenance
Creator Lu X.; Cheng Y.; Ginsburg A.; Longmore S.N.; Kruijssen J.M.D.,Battersby C.; Zhang Q.; Walker D.L.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2021
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; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Stellar Astronomy