What can simulated molecular clouds tell us about real molecular clouds?

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution simulations of spiral galaxies to analyze giant molecular clouds, revealing how CO emission traces dense gas and how galactic environment influences cloud properties and structure.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the relationship between CO emission and molecular gas, and the environmental effects on GMC properties in simulated spiral galaxies.

Findings

CO reliably traces high-density H2 but misses less dense clouds.

CO emission traces peaks but can miss lower density, CO-dark gas.

Galactic environment affects GMC structure and dynamics.

Abstract

We study the properties of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) from a smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation of a portion of a spiral galaxy, modelled at high resolution, with robust representations of the physics of the interstellar medium. We examine the global molecular gas content of clouds, and investigate the effect of using CO or H2 densities to define the GMCs. We find that CO can reliably trace the high-density H2 gas, but misses less dense H2 clouds. We also investigate the effect of using 3D CO densities versus CO emission with an observer's perspective, and find that CO-emission clouds trace well the peaks of the actual GMCs in 3D, but can miss the lower density molecular gas between density peaks which is often CO-dark. Thus, the CO emission typically traces smaller clouds within larger GMC complexes. We also investigate the effect of the galactic environment (in particular the presence of spiral arms), on the distribution of GMC properties, and we find that the mean properties are similar between arm and inter-arm clouds, but the tails of some distributions are indicative of intrinsic differences in the environment. We find highly filamentary clouds (similar to the giant molecular filaments of our Galaxy) exclusively in the inter-arm region, formed by galactic shear. We also find that the most massive GMC complexes are located in the arm, and that as a consequence of more frequent cloud interactions/mergers in the arm, arm clouds are more sub-structured and have higher velocity dispersions than inter-arm clouds.