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2011 Archive
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
Author(s): Nicolaas DeRuyter
Presentation: poster
As massive stars form they influence the interstellar medium surrounding them, which in turn affects how lower mass stars, like our Sun, are formed. Thus, investigating massive star formation is crucial to understanding how nearly every star has formed. This project observes very dense concentrations of gas and dust in our Milky Way because they are the most probable sites of massive star formation. These dense regions of gas and dust are known as Infrared Dark Clouds (IRDCs). Radio wavelength Ammonia(NH3)emission lines are good probes of high density gas, therefore we observed NH3 (1,1) and (2,2) emission line to study star forming clumps in IRDCs G10.74-0.13 and G22.56-0.20. The data were obtained from the Very Large Array (VLA) and analyzed using the Astronomical Image Processing System (AIPS). Analysis of G10.74-0.13 and G22.56-0.20 show clumps of NH3 emission associated with 24 µm wavelength infrared emission likely indicating sites of star formation. Typical optical depth within G10.74-0.13 ranged from 2.17-5.47 whereas the kinetic temperature ranged from 9.38K-20.47K.
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