Kavli Affiliate: Susan E. Clark
| First 5 Authors: Jiancheng Feng, Rowan J. Smith, Alvaro Hacar, Susan E. Clark, Daniel Seifried
| Summary:
The interstellar medium is threaded by a hierarchy of filaments from large
scales (~ 100 pc) to small scales (~ 0.1pc). The masses and lengths of these
nested structures may reveal important constraints for cloud formation and
evolution, but it is difficult to investigate from an evolutionary perspective
using single observations. In this work, we extract simulated molecular clouds
from the Cloud Factory galactic-scale ISM suite in combination with 3D Monte
Carlo radiative transfer code POLARIS to investigate how filamentary structure
evolves over time. We produce synthetic dust continuum observations in three
regions with a series of snapshots and use the Filfinder algorithm to identify
filaments in the dust derived column density maps. When the synthetic filaments
mass and length are plotted on an M-L plot, we see a scaling relation of
$Lpropto M^{0.45}$ similar to that seen in observations, and find that the
filaments are thermally supercritical. Projection effects systematically affect
the masses and lengths measured for the filaments, and are particularly severe
in crowded regions. In the filament Mass-Length (M-L) diagram we identify three
main evolutionary mechanisms: accretion, segmentation, and dispersal. In
particular we find that the filaments typically evolve from smaller to larger
masses in the observational M-L plane, indicating the dominant role of
accretion in filament evolution. Moreover, we find a potential correlation
between line mass and filament growth rate. Once filaments are actively star
forming they then segment into smaller sections, or are dispersed by internal
or external forces.
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