Low-Mass Star Forming Cores in the GF9 Filament

Abstract

We carried out an unbiased mapping survey of dense molecular cloud cores traced by the NH3 (1,1) and (2,2) inversion lines in the GF9 filament which contains an extremely young low-mass protostar GF9-2 (Furuya et al. 2006, ApJ, 653, 1369). The survey was conducted using the Nobeyama 45m telescope over a region of ~1.5 deg with an angular resolution of 73". The large-scale map revealed that the filament contains at least 7 dense cores, as well as 3 possible ones, located at regular intervals of ~0.9 pc. Our analysis shows that these cores have kinetic temperatures of $\lesssim$ 10 K and LTE-masses of 1.8 -- 8.2 Msun, making them typical sites of low-mass star formation. All the identified cores are likely to be gravitationally unstable because their LTE-masses are larger than their virial masses. Since the LTE-masses and separations of the cores are consistent with the Jeans masses and lengths, respectively, for the low-density ambient gas, we argue that the identified cores have formed via the gravitational fragmentation of the natal filamentary cloud.

accepted by pasj

References in corpus (3)

• Theory of Star Formation
• The Initial Conditions for Gravitational Collapse of a Core: An Extremely Young Low-Mass Class 0 Protostar GF9-2
• Comparison of Magnetic Field Structures on Different Scales in and around the Filamentary Dark Cloud GF 9

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Supersonic Cloud Collision-II
• A Dynamically Collapsing Core and a Precursor of a Core in a Filament Supported by Turbulent and Magnetic Pressures
• Magnetic Field Uniformity Across the GF 9-2 YSO, L1082C Dense Core, and GF 9 Filamentary Dark Cloud
• Spectroscopic Evidence for Gas Infall in GF9-2
• A 1000 AU Scale Molecular Outflow Driven by a Protostar with an age of <4000 Years
• Planck Galactic Cold Clumps in Two Regions: the First Quadrant and the Anti-Center Direction Region
• Discovery of 22 GHz Water Masers in the Serpens South Region