The Green Bank Ammonia Survey: Observations of Hierarchical Dense Gas Structures in Cepheus-L1251
Caselli, Paola; Di Francesco, James; Rosolowsky, Erik; Ginsburg, Adam; Myers, Philip C.; Kirk, Helen; Pineda, Jaime E.; Friesen, Rachel K.; Alves, Felipe; Chacón-Tanarro, Ana; Chun-Yuan Chen, Michael; Keown, Jared; Punanova, Anna; Shirley, Yancy; Offner, Stella S. R.; Singh, Ayushi; Goodman, Alyssa A.; Redaelli, Elena; Arce, Hector G.; Matzner, Christopher D.; Seo, Young Min; Chen, How-Huan; Martin, Peter
Canada, Germany, United States
Abstract
We use Green Bank Ammonia Survey observations of NH3 (1, 1) and (2, 2) emission with 32″ FWHM resolution from a ∼10 pc2 portion of the Cepheus-L1251 molecular cloud to identify hierarchical dense gas structures. Our dendrogram analysis of the NH3 data results in 22 top-level structures, which reside within 13 lower-level parent structures. The structures are compact (0.01 {pc}≲ {R}{eff}≲ 0.1 {pc}) and are spatially correlated with the highest H2 column density portions of the cloud. We also compare the ammonia data to a catalog of dense cores identified by higher-resolution (18.″2 FWHM) Herschel Space Observatory observations of dust continuum emission from Cepheus-L1251. Maps of kinetic gas temperature, velocity dispersion, and NH3 column density, derived from detailed modeling of the NH3 data, are used to investigate the stability and chemistry of the ammonia-identified and Herschel-identified structures. We show that the dust and dense gas in the structures have similar temperatures, with median T dust and T K measurements of 11.7 ± 1.1 K and 10.3 ± 2.0 K, respectively. Based on a virial analysis, we find that the ammonia-identified structures are gravitationally dominated, yet may be in or near a state of virial equilibrium. Meanwhile, the majority of the Herschel-identified dense cores appear to be not bound by their own gravity and instead confined by external pressure. CCS (20 - 10) and HC5N (9-8) emission from the region reveal broader line widths and centroid velocity offsets when compared to the NH3 (1, 1) emission in some cases, likely due to these carbon-based molecules tracing the turbulent outer layers of the dense cores.