Seminar
Study of molecular clouds associated with HII regions

Abstract

The properties of molecular clouds associated with 10 H II regions were studied using CO observations. We identified 142 dense clumps within our sample and measured and calculated physical properties of the clumps such as size, excitation temperature, line widths, density and mass. We found that our sources are divided into two categories: those that show a size-line width relation ("type I") and those which do not show any relation ("type II"). Type II sources have larger line widths in general. Investigating the relation between the line width and other parameters shows that while the M_LTE (Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium mass) increases with ΔV (line width) for both 12CO(2-1) and 13CO(2-1) lines in type I sources, no relation was found for type II sources. No relation between column density and line width was found for either category. We also investigated how the characteristics of the clumps vary with distance from the HII region. We found no relation between mass distribution of the clumps and distance from the ionization front, but a weak decrease of the excitation temperature with increasing distance from the ionized gas. Only the projected distance is measured in our study which is equal or smaller than the true value. Therefore we compared the results by a Monte Carlo simulation of a central heating source and found that for small distances the relation is very scattered, which is consistent with our results. No relation was found between line width and distance from the H II region which probably indicates that the internal dynamics of the clumps is not affected by the ionized gas. Internal sources of turbulence, such as outflows and stellar winds from young proto-stars may have a more important role.