A multi-scale filament extraction method: getfilaments

Abstract

Far-infrared imaging surveys of Galactic star-forming regions with Herschel have shown that a substantial part of the cold interstellar medium appears as a fascinating web of omnipresent filamentary structures. This highly anisotropic ingredient of the interstellar material further complicates the difficult problem of the systematic detection and measurement of dense cores in the strongly variable but (relatively) isotropic backgrounds. Observational evidence that stars form in dense filaments creates severe problems for automated source extraction methods that must reliably distinguish sources not only from fluctuating backgrounds and noise, but also from the filamentary structures. A previous paper presented the multi-scale, multi-wavelength source extraction method getsources based on a fine spatial scale decomposition and filtering of irrelevant scales from images. In this paper, a multi-scale, multi-wavelength filament extraction method getfilaments is presented that solves this problem, substantially improving the robustness of source extraction with getsources in filamentary backgrounds. The main difference is that the filaments extracted by getfilaments are now subtracted by getsources from detection images during source extraction, greatly reducing the chances of contaminating catalogs with spurious sources. The intimate physical relationship between forming stars and filaments seen in Herschel observations demands that accurate filament extraction methods must remove the contribution of sources and that accurate source extraction methods must be able to remove underlying filamentary structures. Source extraction with getsources now provides researchers also with clean images of filaments, free of sources, noise, and isotropic backgrounds.

15 pages, 19 figures, to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics; language polished for better readability

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Cited by in corpus (68)

• Characterizing the properties of nearby molecular filaments observed with Herschel
• A census of dense cores in the Aquila cloud complex: SPIRE/PACS observations from the Herschel Gould Belt survey
• The unexpectedly large proportion of high-mass star-forming cores in a Galactic mini-starburst
• A census of dense cores in the Taurus L1495 cloud from the Herschel Gould Belt Survey
• Properties of the dense core population in Orion B as seen by the Herschel Gould Belt survey
• ATLASGAL -- A Galaxy-wide sample of dense filamentary structures
• The Herschel view of the dense core population in the Ophiuchus molecular cloud
• The earliest phases of high-mass star formation, as seen in NGC 6334 by \emph{Herschel}
• The Hi-GAL catalogue of dusty filamentary structures in the Galactic Plane
• A Census of Large-Scale ($\ge$ 10 pc), Velocity-Coherent, Dense Filaments in the Northern Galactic Plane: Automated Identification Using Minimum Spanning Tree
• Multiscale, multiwavelength extraction of sources and filaments using separation of the structural components: getsf
• From diffuse gas to dense molecular cloud cores
• The role of molecular filaments in the origin of the prestellar core mass function and stellar initial mass function
• Interstellar filaments and star formation
• A catalogue of dense cores and young stellar objects in the Lupus complex based on Herschel Gould Belt Survey observations
• The dense cores and filamentary structure of the molecular cloud in Corona Australis. Herschel SPIRE and PACS observations from the Herschel Gould Belt Survey
• RadFil: a Python Package for Building and Fitting Radial Profiles for Interstellar Filaments
• Probing fragmentation and velocity sub-structure in the massive NGC 6334 filament with ALMA
• ALMA-IMF. V. Prestellar and protostellar core populations in the W43 cloud complex
• Star formation towards the Galactic HII region RCW120
• Physical properties of the ambient medium and of dense cores in the Perseus star-forming region derived from Herschel Gould Belt Survey observations
• Magnetized interstellar molecular clouds: II. The Large-Scale Structure and Dynamics of Filamentary Molecular Clouds
• Embedded Binaries and Their Dense Cores
• Dust Emissivity in the Star-Forming Filament OMC 2/3
• Filamentary flow and magnetic geometry in evolving cluster-forming molecular cloud clumps
• Synthetic observations of star formation and the interstellar medium
• Mass segregation and sequential star formation in NGC 2264 revealed by Herschel
• Kinematics of dense gas in the L1495 filament
• KFPA Examinations of Young STellar Object Natal Environments (KEYSTONE): Hierarchical Ammonia Structures in Galactic Giant Molecular Clouds
• Far-infrared observations of a massive cluster forming in the Monoceros R2 filament hub
• Fragmentation of star-forming filaments in the X-shape Nebula of the California molecular cloud
• Herschel Gould Belt Survey Observations of Dense Cores in the Cepheus Flare Clouds
• The role of Galactic HII regions in the formation of filaments. High-resolution submilimeter imaging of RCW 120 with ArTéMiS
• ALMA-IMF XV: The core mass function in the high-mass star-formation regime
• CASI: A Convolutional Neural Network Approach for Shell Identification
• Physical properties and chemical composition of the cores in the California molecular cloud
• Strong dependence of the physical properties of cores on spatial resolution in observations and simulations
• Herschel observations of the Galactic HII region RCW 79
• ALMA observations of RCW 120 Fragmentation at 0.01pc scale
• Planck intermediate results. XXXVIII. E- and B-modes of dust polarization from the magnetized filamentary structure of the interstellar medium
• Magnetic Misalignment of Interstellar Dust Filaments
• Uncertainties and biases of source masses derived from fits of integrated fluxes or image intensities
• How the power spectrum of dust continuum images may hide the presence of a characteristic filament width
• Galactic Cold Cores. VIII. Filament formation and evolution: Filament properties in context with evolutionary models
• Molecular Emission in Dense Massive Clumps from the Star-Forming Regions S231-S235
• The JCMT Gould Belt Survey: SCUBA-2 Data-Reduction Methods and Gaussian Source Recovery Analysis
• Multicomponent, multiwavelength benchmarks for source- and filament-extraction methods
• Nature of Striation in 21 cm Channel Maps: Velocity Caustics
• Prospects for future studies using deep imaging: Analysis of individual Galactic cirrus filaments
• J plots: a new method for characterizing structures in the interstellar medium
• Background derivation and image flattening: getimages
• Galactic Cold Cores VII: Filament Formation and Evolution - Methods & Observational Constraints
• The Milky Way Atlas for Linear Filaments
• Template matching method for the analysis of interstellar cloud structure
• Not so different after all: Properties and Spatial Structure of Column Density Peaks in the Pipe and Orion A Clouds
• Properties of the dense cores and filamentary structures in the Vela C molecular cloud
• A Multi-wavelength Study on the Formation of AFGL 333-Ridge
• MaLeFiSenta: Machine Learning for FilamentS Identification and orientation in the ISM
• Planck intermediate results. LV. Reliability and thermal properties of high-frequency sources in the Second Planck Catalogue of Compact Sources
• Probing the filamentary nature of star formation in the California giant molecular cloud
• Gathering dust: A galaxy-wide study of dust emission from cloud complexes in NGC 300
• Filaments in the OMC-3 cloud and uncertainties in estimates of filament profiles
• Estimating the confusion noise for the Millimetron space telescope
• Ionisation in Turbulent Magnetic Molecular Clouds I. Effect on Density and Mass-to-Flux Ratio Structures
• Sources of confusion noise in the infrared wavelength range
• Investigations of MWISP Filaments. I. Filament Identification and Analysis Algorithms, and Source Catalogue
• Analysis of Galactic cirrus filaments in HSC-SSP high-resolution deep images using artificial neural networks
• Interstellar filament detection and characterization: methods and implications for studies of magnetized interstellar medium