The Aquila prestellar core population revealed by Herschel

By V. Könyves, P. Andr'e, A. Men’shchikov, Nathan Schneider, D. Arzoumanian, S. Bontemps, M. Attard, Fr'ed'erique Motte, P. Didelon, A. Maury and 30 more. 2010

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The origin and possible universality of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is a major issue in astrophysics. One of the main objectives of the Herschel Gould Belt Survey is to clarify the link between the prestellar core mass function (CMF) and the IMF. We present and discuss the core mass function derived from Herschel data for the large population of prestellar cores discovered with SPIRE and PACS in the Aquila Rift cloud complex at d ~ 260 pc. We detect a total of 541 starless cores in the entire ~11 deg^2 area of the field imaged at 70-500 micron with SPIRE/PACS. Most of these cores appear to be gravitationally bound, and thus prestellar in nature. Our Herschel results confirm that the shape of the prestellar CMF resembles the stellar IMF, with much higher quality statistics than earlier submillimeter continuum ground-based surveys.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/706b8182dc26ec640a51e551bd305a74bcd16b62

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Citations in the corpus

ON THE STAR FORMATION EFFICIENCY OF TURBULENT MAGNETIZED CLOUDS (2012, background): “…studied in theory (e.g., Larson 1969; Penston 1969; Shu 1977; Whitworth & Summers 1985), numerical simulations (e.g., Foster & Chevalier 1993; Banerjee & Pudritz 2007; Federrath et al. 2011c), and observations (Könyves et al. 2010; Arzoumanian et al. 2011; Hill et al. 2011; Schneider et al. 2012).”
WHAT DETERMINES THE DENSITY STRUCTURE OF MOLECULAR CLOUDS? A CASE STUDY OF ORION B WITH HERSCHEL (2013, methodology): “The high-density tail, however, cannot be explained by the core population alone because it does not provide sufficient mass (Könyves et al. (2010)).”
Molecular Clouds in the Milky Way (2015, background): “…follow a log-normal function with a peak at a characteristic mass of ∼0.6 − 1 M (Motte et al. 1998, Testi & Sargent 1998, Alves et al. 2007, André et al. 2010, Könyves et al. 2010) yet are similar in shape to the stellar initial mass function (Salpeter 1955, Miller & Scalo 1979, Chabrier 2003).”
Filament Identification through Mathematical Morphology (2015, methodology): “Work from Könyves et al. (2010) shows that the dust temperature decreases toward the centres of filaments, meaning that the values derived here for the mass will be lower limits on the true surface density.”
Filaments and ridges in Vela C revealed by Herschel: from low-mass to high-mass star-forming sites (2011, methodology): “An alternate method was used by Könyves et al. (2010) and Schneider et al. (2010b) who used extinction maps to determine absolute calibration of their Herschel Aquila and Rosette column density maps.”
ESCAPE FRACTION OF IONIZING PHOTONS DURING REIONIZATION: EFFECTS DUE TO SUPERNOVA FEEDBACK AND RUNAWAY OB STARS (2014, background): “Infrared extinction maps of nearby interstellar cores indicate that their size ranges from 0.01 to 0.4 pc (e.g.Alves et al. 2007; Könyves et al. 2010), which is difficult to resolve in current cosmological simulations.”
Importance of the Initial Conditions for Star Formation - I. Cloud Evolution and Morphology (2010, background): “On small scales ( 1 pc), the observed cores clearly deviate from a uniform density (e.g. Pirogov 2009; Bontemps et al. 2010; Könyves et al. 2010).”
A multi-scale, multi-wavelength source extraction method: getsources (2012, methodology): “5 of Könyves et al. (2010) and in Fig.”
A census of dense cores in the Aquila cloud complex: SPIRE/PACS observations from the Herschel Gould Belt survey (2015, methodology): “In our first-look papers (Könyves et al. 2010; André et al. 2010), the criterion adopted to define this lower envelope was simply αBE ≤ 2, by analogy with the usual criterion to select self-gravitating objects based on the virial mass ratio (αvir = Mvir/Mobs ≤ 2 – e.g., Bertoldi & McKee 1992).”