2025/09/01 by Pattle, Kate, Di Francesco, James, Hatchell, Jenny +14
#Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.01483
We present a catalogue of dense cores identified in James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) Gould Belt Survey SCUBA-2 observations of nearby star-forming clouds. We identified 2257 dense cores using the getsources algorithm, of which 59% are starless, and 41% are potentially protostellar. 71% of the starless cores are prestellar core candidates, suggesting a prestellar core lifetime similar to that of Class 0/I YSOs. Higher-mass clouds have a higher fraction of prestellar cores compared to protostars, suggesting a longer average prestellar core lifetime. We assessed completeness by inserting critically-stable Bonnor--Ebert spheres into a blank SCUBA-2 field: completeness scales as distance squared, with an average mass recovery fraction of 73±6% for recovered sources. We calculated core masses and radii, and assessed their gravitational stability using the Bonnor-Ebert criterion. Maximum starless core mass scales with cloud complex mass with an index 0.58± 0.13, consistent with the behaviour of maximum stellar masses in embedded clusters. We performed least-squares and Monte Carlo modelling of the core mass functions (CMFs) of our starless and prestellar core samples. The CMFs can be characterised using log-normal distributions: we do not sample the full range of core masses needed to create the stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF). The CMFs of the clouds are not consistent with being drawn from a single underlying distribution. The peak mass of the starless core CMF increases with cloud mass; the prestellar CMF of the more distant clouds has a peak mass ∼ 3× the log-normal peak for the system IMF, implying a ∼ 33% prestellar core-to-star efficiency.