The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Mass, luminosity, and line width relations of Galactic molecular clouds
Abstract
The authors present measurements of the velocity line width, size, virial mass, and CO luminosity for 273 molecular clouds in the Galactic disk between longitudes of 8° and 90°. These are obtained from three-dimensional data in the Massachusetts-Stony Brook CO Galactic Plane Survey. It is shown that the molecular clouds are in or near virial equilibrium and are not confined by pressure equilibrium with a warm or hot phase of interstellar matter. The velocity line width is proportional to the 0.5 power of the size, σv ∝ S0.5. A tight relationship, over four orders of magnitude, is found between the cloud dynamical mass, as measured by the virial theorem, and the CO luminosity M ∝ (LCO)0.81. The cloud CO luminosity is LCO∝ σv5.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Star Formation in the Milky Way and Nearby Galaxies
Kennicutt, R. C., & Evans, N. J. (2012) · Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics · doi:10.1146/annurev-astro-081811-125610 · Cited by 2,902
“For the area of the cloud defined roughly by the 1 K CO detection threshold, he found a median Σmol(cloud) = 42 M⊙ pc −2 for clouds, substantially less than originally found by Solomon et al. (1987), and only a few clouds have Σmol(cloud) > 100 M⊙ pc −2.”
BackgroundTHE STAR FORMATION EFFICIENCY IN NEARBY GALAXIES: MEASURING WHERE GAS FORMS STARS EFFECTIVELY
Leroy, A. K., Walter, F., Brinks, E., Bigiel, F., de Blok, W. J. G., Madore, B., & Thornley, M. D. (2008) · The Astronomical Journal · doi:10.1088/0004-6256/136/6/2782 · Cited by 1,919
The interstellar environment of our galaxy
Ferrière, K. M. (2001) · Reviews of Modern Physics · doi:10.1103/revmodphys.73.1031 · Cited by 1,019
RE-EXAMINING LARSON'S SCALING RELATIONSHIPS IN GALACTIC MOLECULAR CLOUDS
Heyer, M., Krawczyk, C., Duval, J., & Jackson, J. M. (2009) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/699/2/1092 · Cited by 658
Dissipation in Compressible Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence
Stone, J. M., Ostriker, E. C., & Gammie, C. F. (1998) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/311718 · Cited by 555
Metadata
- Authors
- Solomon, P. M., Rivolo, A. R., Barrett, J., & Yahil, A.
- Venue
- The Astrophysical Journal
- Publisher
- American Astronomical Society
- Published
- 1987-08
- Volume
- 319
- Pages
- 730
- ISSN
- 0004-637X (ISSN-L)
- 1538-4357
- OpenAlex
- W2074529843
- Cited by
- 1,611
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 12.65
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Mass, luminosity, and line width relations of Galactic molecular clouds. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/165493
- The paper
- Solomon, P. M., Rivolo, A. R., Barrett, J., & Yahil, A. (1987). Mass, luminosity, and line width relations of Galactic molecular clouds. The Astrophysical Journal. https://doi.org/10.1086/165493
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
