Clouds, filaments and protostars: the Herschel Hi-GAL Milky Way

TL;DR

This paper presents initial results from the Herschel Hi-GAL survey mapping the Milky Way's inner Galactic Plane, highlighting filamentary structures, core formation thresholds, and their relation to physical parameters and simulations.

Contribution

First observational insights into filament and core formation in the Milky Way using Herschel data, linking physical parameters to theoretical models.

Findings

Filaments are widespread and organized in the observed regions.

Core formation correlates with a threshold in visual extinction (A_V).

Results agree with MHD simulations of filament formation from converging flows.

Abstract

We present the first results from the science demonstration phase for the Hi-GAL survey, the Herschel key-project that will map the inner Galactic Plane of the Milky Way in 5 bands. We outline our data reduction strategy and present some science highlights on the two observed 2{\deg} x 2{\deg} tiles approximately centered at l=30{\deg} and l=59{\deg}. The two regions are extremely rich in intense and highly structured extended emission which shows a widespread organization in filaments. Source SEDs can be built for hundreds of objects in the two fields, and physical parameters can be extracted, for a good fraction of them where the distance could be estimated. The compact sources (which we will call 'cores' in the following) are found for the most part to be associated with the filaments, and the relationship to the local beam-averaged column density of the filament itself shows that a core seems to appear when a threshold around A_V of about 1 is exceeded for the regions in the l=59{\deg} field; a A_V value between 5 and 10 is found for the l=30{\deg} field, likely due to the relatively larger distances of the sources. This outlines an exciting scenario where diffuse clouds first collapse into filaments, which later fragment to cores where the column density has reached a critical level. In spite of core L/M ratios being well in excess of a few for many sources, we find core surface densities between 0.03 and 0.5 g cm-2. Our results are in good agreement with recent MHD numerical simulations of filaments forming from large-scale converging flows.