Planck Early Results: The submillimetre properties of a sample of Galactic cold clumps

TL;DR

This study investigates the physical properties and internal structures of Galactic cold clumps detected by Planck, validating detection reliability and separating dust emission components using multi-instrument data.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of Planck cold clumps' morphology, temperature, and dust properties across different Galactic environments.

Findings

Validated the reliability of Planck cold clump detections

Separated warm and cold dust emission components

Revealed internal structures and temperature variations

Abstract

(abridged) We perform a detailed investigation of sources from the Cold Cores Catalogue of Planck Objects (C3PO). Our goal is to probe the reliability of the detections, validate the separation between warm and cold dust emission components, provide the first glimpse at the nature, internal morphology and physical characterictics of the Planck-detected sources. We focus on a sub-sample of ten sources from the C3PO list, selected to sample different environments, from high latitude cirrus to nearby (150pc) and remote (2kpc) molecular complexes. We present Planck surface brightness maps and derive the dust temperature, emissivity spectral index, and column densities of the fields. With the help of higher resolution Herschel and AKARI continuum observations and molecular line data, we investigate the morphology of the sources and the properties of the substructures at scales below the Planck beam size.