Properties of massive star-forming clumps with infall motions

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2016-09, Vol.461 (3), p.2288-2308
• Main Authors: He, Yu-Xin, Zhou, Jian-Jun, Esimbek, Jarken, Ji, Wei-Guang, Wu, Gang, Tang, Xin-Di, Komesh, Toktarkhan, Yuan, Ye, Li, Da-Lei, Baan, W. A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Astronomy; Clumps; Density; Evolutionary; Kinematics; Legacy; Star & galaxy formation; Star formation; Symbols; Trends
• ISSN: 0035-8711; 1365-2966
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw1301

In this work, we aim to characterize high-mass clumps with infall motions. We selected 327 clumps from the Millimetre Astronomy Legacy Team 90-GHz survey, and identified 100 infall candidates. Combined with the results of He et al., we obtained a sample of 732 high-mass clumps, including 231 massive infall candidates and 501 clumps where infall is not detected. Objects in our sample were classified as pre-stellar, proto-stellar, H ii or photodissociation region (PDR). The detection rates of the infall candidates in the pre-stellar, proto-stellar, H ii and PDR stages are 41.2 per cent, 36.6 per cent, 30.6 per cent and 12.7 per cent, respectively. The infall candidates have a higher H2 column density and volume density compared with the clumps where infall is not detected at every stage. For the infall candidates, the median values of the infall rates at the pre-stellar, proto-stellar, H ii and PDR stages are 2.6 × 10−3, 7.0 × 10−3, 6.5 × 10−3 and 5.5 × 10−3 M⊙ yr−1, respectively. These values indicate that infall candidates at later evolutionary stages are still accumulating material efficiently. It is interesting to find that both infall candidates and clumps where infall is not detected show a clear trend of increasing mass from the pre-stellar to proto-stellar, and to the H ii stages. The power indices of the clump mass function are 2.04 ± 0.16 and 2.17 ± 0.31 for the infall candidates and clumps where infall is not detected, respectively, which agree well with the power index of the stellar initial mass function (2.35) and the cold Planck cores (2.0).