2MASS wide field extinction maps: V. Corona Australis
Jo\~ao Alves, Marco Lombardi, Charles Lada

TL;DR
This paper presents a detailed near-infrared extinction map of the Corona Australis molecular cloud complex, revealing its large size, filamentary structure, and complex column density distribution, with implications for understanding cloud structure.
Contribution
It provides the first high-resolution, large-area extinction map of Corona Australis, analyzing its column density PDF and revealing limitations of previous models at low densities.
Findings
Corona Australis is three times larger than previous surveys indicated.
The cloud's column density PDF cannot be well described by a single log-normal function.
At high column densities, the PDF follows a power-law with index -3.
Abstract
We present a near-infrared extinction map of a large region (870 deg) covering the isolated Corona Australis complex of molecular clouds. We reach a 1- error of 0.02 mag in the K-band extinction with a resolution of 3 arcmin over the entire map. We find that the Corona Australis cloud is about three times as large as revealed by previous CO and dust emission surveys. The cloud consists of a 45 pc long complex of filamentary structure from the well known star forming Western-end (the head, cm) to the diffuse Eastern-end the tail, ( cm). Remarkably, about two thirds of the complex both in size and mass lie beneath A mag. We find that the PDF of the cloud cannot be described by a single log-normal function. Similar to prior studies, we found a significant excess at high column densities, but a log-normal + power-law…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAstrophysics and Star Formation Studies · Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies · Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena
