The spine of the swan: a Herschel study of the DR21 ridge and filaments in Cygnus X

By M. Hennemann, Fr'ed'erique Motte, N. Schneider, P. Didelon, T. Hill, D. Arzoumanian, S. Bontemps, T. Csengeri, P. Andre', V. Könyves and 24 more. 2012

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In order to characterise the cloud structures responsible for the formation of high-mass stars, we present Herschel observations of the DR21 environment. Maps of the column density and dust temperature unveil the structure of the DR21 ridge and several connected filaments. The ridge has column densities larger than 1e23/cm^2 over a region of 2.3 pc^2. It shows substructured column density profiles and branching into two major filaments in the north. The masses in the studied filaments range between 130 and 1400 Msun whereas the mass in the ridge is 15000 Msun. The accretion of these filaments onto the DR21 ridge, suggested by a previous molecular line study, could provide a continuous mass inflow to the ridge. In contrast to the striations seen in e.g., the Taurus region, these filaments are gravitationally unstable and form cores and protostars. These cores formed in the filaments potentially fall into the ridge. Both inflow and collisions of cores could be important to drive the observed high-mass star formation. The evolutionary gradient of star formation running from DR21 in the south to the northern branching is traced by decreasing dust temperature. This evolution and the ridge structure can be explained by two main filamentary components of the ridge that merged first in the south.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c9d8f81a5519fcb42702b8f5e73390adb3878a2

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Citations in the corpus

An ALMA study of the Orion Integral Filament: I. Evidence for narrow fibers in a massive cloud (2018, background): “Typically located at kpc distances, most of these massive filaments are found in hub-like associations (Myers 2009) forming dense ridges of gas (Galván-Madrid et al. 2010; Schneider et al. 2010; Henning et al. 2010; Hill et al. 2011; Hennemann et al. 2012; Peretto et al. 2013).”
ON THE STAR FORMATION EFFICIENCY OF TURBULENT MAGNETIZED CLOUDS (2012, background): “…signs of infall (Schneider et al. 2010), which is likely the reason for Cygnus X exhibiting a slightly positive α on length scales representative of that filament (length ∼ 20 pc, width ∼ 5 pc) and subfilaments collapsing toward the main filament (Schneider et al. 2010; Hennemann et al. 2012).”
Global collapse of molecular clouds as a formation mechanism for the most massive stars (2013, background): “1), reminiscent of hub-filament systems (Myers 2009) observed in a number of low-mass (André et al. 2010; Peretto et al. 2012) and high-mass (Schneider et al. 2012; Hennemann et al. 2012) star-forming regions.”
FILAMENTARY ACCRETION FLOWS IN THE EMBEDDED SERPENS SOUTH PROTOCLUSTER (2013, background): “Filaments associated with massive star formation tend to be highly supercritical with Mline often ten times larger than that in nearby regions (Hennemann et al 2012).”
THE STAR FORMATION RATE OF TURBULENT MAGNETIZED CLOUDS: COMPARING THEORY, SIMULATIONS, AND OBSERVATIONS (2012, background): “This is a reasonable approximation for dense, molecular gas of solar metallicity, over a wide range of densities (Wolfire et al. 1995; Omukai et al. 2005; Pavlovski et al. 2006; Glover & Mac Low 2007a,b; Glover et al. 2010; Hill et al. 2011; Hennemann et al. 2012).”