1306.0046 (Tie Liu et al.)

CO depletion --- An evolutionary tracer for molecular clouds    [PDF]

Tie Liu, Yuefang Wu, Huawei Zhang

Planck cold clumps are among the most promising objects to investigate the initial conditions of the evolution of molecular clouds. In this work, by combing the dust emission data from the survey of Planck satellite with the molecular data of $^{12}$CO/$^{13}$CO (1-0) lines from observations with the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) 14 m telescope, we investigate the CO abundance, CO depletion and CO-to-H$_{2}$ conversion factor of 674 clumps in the early cold cores (ECC) sample. The median and mean values of the CO abundance are 6.2$\times10^{-5}$ and 9.1$\times10^{-5}$, respectively. The mean and median of CO depletion factor are 2.8 and 1.4, respectively. The median value of $X_{CO-to-H_{2}}$ for the whole sample is $3.3\times10^{20}$ cm$^{-2}$K$^{-1}$km$^{-1}$ s. The CO abundance, CO depletion factor and CO-to-H$_{2}$ conversion factor seems to be strongly correlated to other physical parameters (e.g. dust temperature, dust emissivity spectra index and column density). CO gas severely freeze out in colder and denser regions with the growth of icy mantles on dust grains.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0046