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Pressure-confined clumps in magnetized molecular clouds
Abstract
A substantial fraction of the mass of a giant molecular cloud (GMC) in the Galaxy is confined to clumps which occupy a small fraction of the volume of the cloud. A majority of the clumps in several well-studied GMCs (Ophiuchus, Orion G, Rosette, Cepheus OB3) are not in gravitational virial equilibrium, but instead are confined by the pressure of the surrounding medium. These clumps thus violate one of 'Larson's (1981) laws'. Generalizing the standard virial analysis for spherical clouds to spheroidal clouds, we determine the Jeans mass and the magnetic critical mass for the clumps in these clouds. The Alfven Mach number, which is proportional to the internal velocity dispersion of the clumps divided by the Alfven velocity, is estimated to be of order unity for all the clumps. The more massive clumps, which are in gravitational virial equilibrium, are too massive to be supported by magnetic fields alone (i.e., they are magnetically supercritical). Internally generated turbulence must play a key role in supporting these clumps.
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Citations
Cited by
Magnetic Fields in Molecular Clouds: Observations Confront Theory
Crutcher, R. M. (1999) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/307483 · Cited by 915
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Kruijssen, J. M. D., Longmore, S. N., Elmegreen, B. G., Murray, N., Bally, J., Testi, L., & Kennicutt, R. C. (2014) · Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society · doi:10.1093/mnras/stu494 · Cited by 288
The turbulent origin of spin–orbit misalignment in planetary systems
Fielding, D. B., McKee, C. F., Socrates, A., Cunningham, A. J., & Klein, R. I. (2015) · Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society · doi:10.1093/mnras/stv836 · Cited by 123
Self-citationThe Circumnuclear Disk Revealed by ALMA. I. Dense Clouds and Tides in the Galactic Center
Hsieh, P.-Y., Koch, P. M., Kim, W.-T., Martín, S., Yen, H.-W., Carpenter, J. M., Harada, N., Turner, J. L., Ho, P. T. P., Tang, Y.-W., et al. (2021) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/abf4cd · Cited by 40
“The external pressure required for equilibrium in the CND is 2-4 orders of magnitude higher than the typical molecular clouds in galactic disks (Pext = 10 4−5 cm−3 K, Bertoldi & McKee 1992; Belloche et al. 2011).”
BackgroundMethodInfluential
Metadata
- Authors
- Bertoldi, F., & McKee, C. F.
- Venue
- The Astrophysical Journal
- Publisher
- American Astronomical Society
- Published
- 1992-08
- Volume
- 395
- Pages
- 140
- ISSN
- 0004-637X (ISSN-L)
- 1538-4357
- OpenAlex
- W2088763329
- Cited by
- 879
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 1.31
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Bertoldi, F., & McKee, C. F. (1992). Pressure-confined clumps in magnetized molecular clouds. The Astrophysical Journal. https://doi.org/10.1086/171638
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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.
