[140.10] Self-Similarity in the Rosette Molecular Cloud

AAS 205th Meeting, 9-13 January 2005
Session 140 Cold Gas and Molecular Clouds
Poster, Thursday, January 13, 2005, 9:20am-4:00pm, Exhibit Hall

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[140.10] Self-Similarity in the Rosette Molecular Cloud

A. M. Hughes (Yale University), J. P. Williams (University of Hawaii)

The Rosette Molecular Cloud is an active region of star formation in the Milky Way. We present a study of the cloud using a large scale ¹²CO and ¹³CO map of the cloud obtained at the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory. The map covers 6 square degrees at a resolution of 50’’ (0.3 pc). Using a clump deconvolution algorithm, we divided the cloud into discrete regions of emission and calculated their physical properties including mass, size, linewidth, temperature, aspect ratio and degree of virialization. Clumps with embedded IRAS sources tend to be hotter and somewhat denser than average. The HII region at the cloud’s edge produces a pronounced temperature gradient in the cloud (temperature decreasing as the inverse square root of distance) but does not significantly affect other clump properties. We also smoothed the data set to lower resolutions to study the dependence of the derived clump properties on size scale. The cloud structure was found to be self-similar but clump densities and their virialization parameter decreased with smoothing scale.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.

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