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| EPoS Contribution |
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A search for 13CO filaments in the Taurus molecular cloud
Georgia Panopoulou U Crete, Heraklion, GR | |
| We have searched for filamentary structures in the 13CO data of the Taurus molecular cloud from the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory CO Mapping Survey. The data cover ~100 square degrees and could thus in principle be very revealing about the statistical properties of filaments within a single cloud. We looked for filamentary-like structures using the, widely used with Herschel data, DisPerSe software. Surprisingly, we found that, although DisPerSe detected hundreds of potential filamentary structures, very few of them were indeed continuous, elongated structures with cross-section intensity profiles peaked on the spine of the filament. We then filtered the DisPerSe results by demanding filaments to be continuous, elongated structures. We studied the properties of the resulting filaments in the integrated 13CO emission and in velocity channels. The root of the discrepancy between the many structures identified by DisPerSe and the filaments in Taurus, stems from a property of DisPerSe (and possibly other topology-tracing algorithms) that allows it to string together elongated cores into what appear to be long filaments. This effect might arificially enhance the number of cores that appear associated with filaments, so we propose specific ways to alleviate this bias in analysis of filamentary data. | |
| Collaborators: K. Tassis, FORTH, U Crete, Greece P.F. Goldsmith, JPL, USA M. Heyer, UMASS, USA |
Suggested Session:
Filaments |