The Energy Budged of a Molecular Cloud

Maximilian Disch

Poster -- Galactic scale ISM and star formation, Molecular clouds and filaments

The energetics of molecular clouds involves stellar feedback, gravity, turbulence and bulk ordered motion, with an interplay between heating and cooling. To better understand the dynamics in giant molecular clouds like Orion A, the investigation of heating and cooling rates and the resulting equilibrium temperatures is crucial. Therefor, we ran CLOUDY models of multiple physical conditions with e.g different densities, temperatures and cosmic ray rates to get an estimate for heating and cooling rates of those configurations. Using these and comparing them to temperature maps derived from observational data of the CARMA Orion study, we can get limits for physical parameters of the cloud. This is done by evaluating the conditions of the gas in order to be stable at the observed temperature. By constraining the heating and cooling rates limits, we can ascertain which of the various heating terms and energy sources plausibly dominate the dynamics.