Dynamics in Star-forming Cores (DiSCo): project overview and the first look towards the B1 and NGC 1333 regions in Perseus
Friesen, Rachel; Li, Zhi-Yun; Pineda, Jaime E.; Ostriker, Eve C.; Looney, Leslie W.; Chen, Che-Yu; Mundy, Lee G.; Offner, Stella; Lam, Ka Ho; Hsieh, Tien-Hao; Harris, Andrew I.; Schmiedeke, Anika; Li, Jialu; Frayer, David; Church, Sarah; Tobin, John
United States, Canada, Germany
Abstract
The internal velocity structure within dense gaseous cores plays a crucial role in providing the initial conditions for star formation in molecular clouds. However, the kinematic properties of dense gas at core scales (~0.01-0.1 pc) has not been extensively characterized because of instrument limitations until the unique capabilities of GBT-Argus became available. The ongoing GBT-Argus Large Program, Dynamics in Star-forming Cores (DiSCo) thus aims to investigate the origin and distribution of angular momentum of star-forming cores. DiSCo will survey all starless cores and Class 0 protostellar cores in the Perseus molecular complex down to ~0.01 pc scales with <0.05 km s-1 velocity resolution using the dense gas tracer N2H+. Here, we present the first data sets from DiSCo towards the B1 and NGC 1333 regions in Perseus. Our results suggest that a dense core's internal velocity structure has little correlation with other core-scale properties, indicating these gas motions may be originated externally from cloud-scale turbulence. These first data sets also reaffirm the ability of GBT-Argus for studying dense core velocity structure and provided an empirical basis for future studies that address the angular momentum problem with a statistically broad sample.