On the Lifetime of Molecular Clouds with the "Tuning-Fork" Analysis

TL;DR

The paper critically examines the 'tuning-fork' analysis used to estimate molecular cloud lifetimes, revealing it actually measures the duration of cloud evolutionary phases rather than true cloud lifetimes, and discusses potential biases.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the 'tuning-fork' analysis captures cloud evolution timescales, not actual cloud lifetimes, and explores the physical and systematic factors influencing this measurement.

Findings

TF analysis measures cloud evolutionary cycle duration.

Drifting motion is necessary to separate stars from clouds in the analysis.

Systematic errors can bias the estimated timescales.

Abstract

The "tuning-fork" (TF) analysis of CO and Halpha emission has been used to estimate the lifetimes of molecular clouds in nearby galaxies. With simple model calculations, we show that this analysis does not necessarily estimate cloud lifetimes, but instead captures a duration of the cloud evolutionary cycle, from dormant to star forming, and then back to a dormant phase. We adopt a hypothetical setup in which molecular clouds (e.g., traced in CO) live forever and form stars (e.g., HII regions) at some frequency, which then drift away from the clouds. The TF analysis still returns a timescale for the immortal clouds. This model requires drifting motion to separate the newborn stars from the clouds, and we discuss its origin. We also discuss the physical origin of the characteristic spatial separation term in the TF analysis and a bias due to systematic error in the determination of the reference timescale.