The clumpiness of molecular clouds: HCO+ (3--2) survey near Herbig-Haro objects

TL;DR

This study surveys HCO+ emissions near Herbig-Haro objects to quantify the clumpiness of molecular clouds, revealing high heterogeneity and a significant presence of dense gas clumps unaffected by shocks.

Contribution

It introduces a method using HCO+ emission as an indicator to measure molecular cloud clumpiness around HH objects, providing new insights into cloud heterogeneity.

Findings

Half of the HH objects have detectable HCO+ clumps.

All H13CO+ searches indicate widespread clumpiness.

Clumps are dense, narrow-lined, and unaffected by shocks.

Abstract

Some well-studied Herbig Haro objects have associated with them one or more cold, dense, and quiescent clumps of gas. We propose that such clumps near an HH object can be used as a general measure of clumpiness in the molecular cloud that contains that HH object. Our aim is to make a survey of clumps around a sample of HH objects, and to use the results to make an estimate of the clumpiness in molecular clouds. All known cold, dense, and quiescent clumps near HH objects are anomalously strong HCO+ emitters. Our method is, therefore, to search for strong HCO+ emission as an indicator of a clump near to an HH object. The searches were made using JCMT and SEST in the HCO+ 3-2 and also H13CO+ 1-0 lines, with some additional searches for methanol and sulphur monoxide lines. The sources selected were a sample of 22 HH objects in which no previous HCO+ emission had been detected. We find that half of the HH objects have clumps detected in the HCO+ 3-2 line and that all searches in H13CO$+ 1-0 lines show evidence of clumpiness. All condensations have narrow linewidths and are evidently unaffected dynamically by the HH jet shock. We conclude that the molecular clouds in which these HH objects are found must be highly heterogeneous on scales of less than 0.1 pc. An approximate calculation based on these results suggests that the area filling factor of clumps affected by HH objects is on the order of 10%. These clumps have gas number densities larger than 3e4 cm-2.