A Uniform Catalog of Molecular Clouds in the Milky Way
Thomas S. Rice, Alyssa A. Goodman, Edwin A. Bergin, Christopher, Beaumont, and T. M. Dame

TL;DR
This paper presents a comprehensive catalog of 1064 molecular clouds in the Milky Way, analyzing their properties, distributions, and mass functions, revealing environmental influences on cloud characteristics and providing a basis for extragalactic comparisons.
Contribution
It introduces a uniform dendrogram-based catalog of Galactic molecular clouds and compares their properties across different Galactic regions, highlighting environmental effects.
Findings
Inner Galaxy clouds have higher linewidths at given sizes.
Mass functions differ significantly between inner and outer Galaxy.
The inner Galaxy hosts more massive molecular clouds.
Abstract
The all-Galaxy CO survey of Dame, Hartmann, & Thaddeus (2001) is by far the most uniform, large-scale Galactic CO survey. Using a dendrogram-based decomposition of this survey, we present a catalog of 1064 massive molecular clouds throughout the Galactic plane. This catalog contains solar masses, or of the Milky Way's estimated H mass. We track clouds in some spiral arms through multiple quadrants. The power index of Larson's first law, the size-linewidth relation, is consistent with 0.5 in all regions - possibly due to an observational bias - but clouds in the inner Galaxy systematically have significantly (~ 30%) higher linewidths at a given size, indicating that their linewidths are set in part by Galactic environment. The mass functions of clouds in the inner Galaxy versus the outer Galaxy are both qualitatively and quantitatively…
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