Numerical Simulation and Completeness Survey of Bubbles in the Taurus and Perseus Molecular Clouds

TL;DR

This study assesses the completeness of bubble detection in Taurus and Perseus molecular clouds through simulations, concluding that previous methods captured most energetic bubbles and star formation feedback likely sustains turbulence.

Contribution

The paper introduces a simulation-based approach to evaluate bubble detection completeness and confirms the energetic sufficiency of star formation feedback in molecular clouds.

Findings

Detection completeness for bubbles with kinetic energy above ~$1-2 imes 10^{44}$ erg.

Missing kinetic energy accounts for less than 1% of total bubble energy.

Star formation feedback can sustain turbulence at relevant spatial scales.

Abstract

Previous studies have analyzed the energy injection into the interstellar matter due to molecular bubbles. They found that the total kinetic energies of bubbles are comparable to, or even larger than, those of outflows but still less than the gravitational potential and turbulence energies of the hosting clouds. We examined the possibility that previous studies underestimated the energy injection due to being unable to detect dim or incomplete bubbles. We simulated typical molecular bubbles and inserted them into the $^{13}$CO Five College Radio Astronomical Observatory maps of the Taurus and Perseus Molecular Clouds. We determined bubble identification completeness by applying the same procedures to both simulated and real data sets. We proposed a detectability function for both the Taurus and Perseus molecular clouds based on a multivariate approach. In Taurus, bubbles with kinetic energy less than ~$1 \times 10^{44}$ erg are likely to be missed. We found that the total missing kinetic energy in Taurus is less than a couple of $10^{44}$ erg, which only accounts for around 0.2% of the total kinetic energy of identified bubbles. In Perseus, bubbles with kinetic energy less than ~$2 \times 10^{44}$ erg are likely to be missed. We found that the total missing kinetic energy in Perseus is less than $10^{45}$ erg, which only accounts for around 1% of the total kinetic energy of identified bubbles. We thus conclude that previous manual bubble identification routines used in Taurus and Perseus can be considered to be energetically complete. Therefore, we confirm that energy injection from dynamic structures, namely outflows and bubbles, produced by star formation feedback are sufficient to sustain turbulence at a spatial scale from ~0.1 to ~2.8 pc.