A quantitative analysis of IRAS maps of molecular clouds

Abstract

We present an analysis of IRAS maps of five molecular clouds: Orion, Ophiuchus, Perseus, Taurus, and Lupus. For the classification and description of these astrophysical maps, we use a newly developed technique which considers all maps of a given type to be elements of a pseudometric space. For each physical characteristic of interest, this formal system assigns a distance function (a pseudometric) to the space of all maps; this procedure allows us to measure quantitatively the difference between any two maps and to order the space of all maps. We thus obtain a quantitative classification scheme for molecular clouds. In this present study we use the IRAS continuum maps at 100$\mu$m and 60$\mu$m to produce column density (or optical depth) maps for the five molecular cloud regions given above. For this sample of clouds, we compute the ``output'' functions which measure the distribution of density, the distribution of topological components, the self-gravity, and the filamentary nature of the clouds. The results of this work provide a quantitative description of the structure in these molecular cloud regions. We then order the clouds according to the overall environmental ``complexity'' of these star forming regions. Finally, we compare our results with the observed populations of young stellar objects in these clouds and discuss the possible environmental effects on the star formation process. Our results are consistent with the recently stated conjecture that more massive stars tend to form in more ``complex'' environments.