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DYNAMICALLY DRIVEN EVOLUTION OF THE INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM IN M51
Open accessAbstract
Massive star formation occurs in giant molecular clouds (GMCs); an understanding of the evolution of GMCs is a prerequisite to develop theories of star formation and galaxy evolution. We report the highest-fidelity observations of the grand-design spiral galaxy M51 in carbon monoxide (CO) emission, revealing the evolution of GMCs vis-a-vis the large-scale galactic structure and dynamics. The most massive GMCs (giant molecular associations (GMAs)) are first assembled and then broken up as the gas flow through the spiral arms. The GMAs and their H 2 molecules are not fully dissociated into atomic gas as predicted in stellar feedback scenarios, but are fragmented into smaller GMCs upon leaving the spiral arms. The remnants of GMAs are detected as the chains of GMCs that emerge from the spiral arms into interarm regions. The kinematic shear within the spiral arms is sufficient to unbind the GMAs against self-gravity. We conclude that the evolution of GMCs is driven by large-scale galactic dynamics—their coagulation into GMAs is due to spiral arm streaming motions upon entering the arms, followed by fragmentation due to shear as they leave the arms on the downstream side. In M51, the majority of the gas remains molecular from arm entry through the interarm region and into the next spiral arm passage.
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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
“…the mass function appears to be steeper in the interarm regions of M51 than in the spiral arms (E. Schinnerer and A. Hughes, personal communication), possibly caused by the aggregation of clouds into larger structures within arms and disaggregation as they leave the arms (Koda et al. 2009).”
BackgroundMolecular Clouds in the Milky Way
Heyer, M., & Dame, T. M. (2015) · Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics · doi:10.1146/annurev-astro-082214-122324 · Cited by 536
PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF MOLECULAR CLOUDS FOR THE ENTIRE MILKY WAY DISK
Miville-Deschênes, M.-A., Murray, N., & Lee, E. J. (2017) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/834/1/57 · Cited by 396
PHANGS–ALMA: Arcsecond CO(2–1) Imaging of Nearby Star-forming Galaxies
Leroy, A. K., Schinnerer, E., Hughes, A., Rosolowsky, E., Pety, J., Schruba, A., Usero, A., Blanc, G. A., Chevance, M., Emsellem, E., et al. (2021) · The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series · doi:10.3847/1538-4365/ac17f3 · Cited by 391
Krumholz, M. R. (2014) · Physics Reports · doi:10.1016/j.physrep.2014.02.001 · Cited by 321
Metadata
- Authors
- Koda, J., Scoville, N., Sawada, T., La Vigne, M. A., Vogel, S. N., Potts, A. E., Carpenter, J. M., Corder, S. A., Wright, M. C. H., White, S. M., Zauderer, B. A., Patience, J., Sargent, A. I., Bock, D. C. J., Hawkins, D., Hodges, M., Kemball, A., Lamb, J. W., Plambeck, R. L., Pound, M. W., Scott, S. L., Teuben, P., & Woody, D. P.
- Venue
- The Astrophysical Journal
- Publisher
- American Astronomical Society
- Published
- 2009-07-13
- Volume
- 700
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- L132-L136
- ISSN
- 0004-637X (ISSN-L)
- 1538-4357
- OpenAlex
- W1999691522
- Cited by
- 176
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 4.63
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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- Koda, J., Scoville, N., Sawada, T., La Vigne, M. A., Vogel, S. N., Potts, A. E., Carpenter, J. M., Corder, S. A., Wright, M. C. H., White, S. M., Zauderer, B. A., Patience, J., Sargent, A. I., Bock, D. C. J., Hawkins, D., Hodges, M., Kemball, A., Lamb, J. W., Plambeck, R. L., . . . Woody, D. P. (2009). DYNAMICALLY DRIVEN EVOLUTION OF THE INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM IN M51. The Astrophysical Journal. https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637x/700/2/l132
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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