ATOMS: ALMA Three-millimeter Observations of Massive Star-forming regions-IX. A pilot study towards IRDC G034.43+00.24 on multi-scale structures and gas kinematics

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution ALMA data to analyze gas motions at multiple scales in a massive star-forming filament, revealing scale-dependent dynamics driven by turbulence and gravity.

Contribution

It provides a detailed multi-scale analysis of gas kinematics in an IRDC, highlighting the different roles of turbulence and gravity at various spatial scales.

Findings

Leaves are less dynamically supersonic than branches.

Velocity-size relation follows Larson scaling at large scales.

Small-scale structures show deviation with steeper velocity slopes.

Abstract

We present a comprehensive study of the gas kinematics associated with density structures at different spatial scales in the filamentary infrared dark cloud, G034.43+00.24 (G34). This study makes use of the H13CO+ (1-0) molecular line data from the ALMA Three-millimeter Observations of Massive Star-forming regions (ATOMS) survey, which has spatial and velocity resolution of 0.04 pc and 0.2 km/s, respectively. Several tens of dendrogram structures have been extracted in the position-position-velocity space of H13CO+, which include 21 small-scale leaves and 20 larger-scale branches. Overall, their gas motions are supersonic but they exhibit the interesting behavior where leaves tend to be less dynamically supersonic than the branches. For the larger-scale, branch structures, the observed velocity-size relation (i.e., velocity variation/dispersion versus size) are seen to follow the Larson scaling exponent while the smaller-scale, leaf structures show a systematic deviation and display a steeper slope. We argue that the origin of the observed kinematics of the branch structures is likely to be a combination of turbulence and gravity-driven ordered gas flows. In comparison, gravity-driven chaotic gas motion is likely at the level of small-scale leaf structures. The results presented in our previous paper and this current follow-up study suggest that the main driving mechanism for mass accretion/inflow observed in G34 varies at different spatial scales. We therefore conclude that a scale-dependent combined effect of turbulence and gravity is essential to explain the star-formation processes in G34.