EPoS Contribution |
The width of Herschel filaments varies with distance
Gina Panopoulou Caltech, Pasadena, CA, US | |
Filamentary structures in molecular clouds appear to have a characteri- stic width in observations of dust emission. In recent years, this re- sult has been called into question due to concerns on biases in the ado- pted measurement methodology. The finding is still debated today, with conflicting evidence for and against the existence of a characteristic width presented in the literature. We explore a previously overlooked uncertainty in the width determination: the distance estimation. We re- vise distance estimates to nearby clouds based on Gaia and examine the distribution of filament widths in individual clouds. We show that fil- ament widths show a significant dependence on the cloud distance, and are incompatible with the idea of a characteristic width. | |
Caption: Distance dependence of filament widths | |
Collaborators: S.E. Clark, Stanford, US A. Hacar, U. Vienna, AT F. Heitsch, UNC-Chapel Hill, US J. Kainulainen, Chalmers, SE E. Ntormousi, SNS Pisa, IT D. Seifried, U Cologne, DE R.J. Smith, U Manchester, UK |
Key publication
Suggested Session: Filaments |