2023/12/19 by Che-Yu Chen, Chen, Che-Yu, Rachel Friesen +29 · 1 citation
Chemical Engineering · Chemistry · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Combustion Engine Technologies #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Molecular Spectroscopy and Structure #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.12504
openalex publication_date 2023/12/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The internal velocity structure within dense gaseous cores plays a crucial role in providing the initial conditions for star formation in molecular clouds. However, the kinematic properties of dense gas at core scales (~0.01 - 0.1 pc) has not been extensively characterized because of instrument limitations until the unique capabilities of GBT-Argus became available. The ongoing GBT-Argus Large Program, Dynamics in Star-forming Cores (DiSCo) thus aims to investigate the origin and distribution of angular momenta of star-forming cores. DiSCo will survey all starless cores and Class 0 protostellar cores in the Perseus molecular complex down to ~0.01 pc scales with < 0.05 km/s velocity resolution using the dense gas tracer N2H+. Here, we present the first datasets from DiSCo toward the B1 and NGC 1333 regions in Perseus. Our results suggest that a dense core's internal velocity structure has little correlation with other core-scale properties, indicating these gas motions may be originated externally from cloud-scale turbulence. These first datasets also reaffirm the ability of GBT-Argus for studying dense core velocity structure and provided an empirical basis for future studies that address the angular momentum problem with a statistically broad sample.