CO survey of ARCHEOPS cold cores

Abstract

Density and velocity distribution of 13 molecular clouds have been derived from multi-isotopic multi-line CO observations. These observations are investigations of the initial conditions for star formation in cold molecular cloud cores. The targets were selected from the ARCHEOPS point sources (Désert et al. 1987). The ARCHEOPS balloon born submm-mm telescope located cold interstellar clouds with ~ 12 arcmin angular resolution (Désert et al. 1987, Benoit et al. 2002). A sub-sample of 13 clouds have been mapped in 12CO(3-2), 13CO(2-1) and C18O(2-1). The observations have been carried out with the KOSMA-3m telescope (Kramer et al. 2000) in February, 2009. The measuring's pointing accuracy was around 10 arcsec. The calibration error was about 10-15%. The derived distribution of the gas column density indicated structured isolated molecular clouds with embedded cloud cores in 9 cases. Velocity gradient was found in 4 cases. The data set will be further used as input for Herschel target selection, observation and radiative transfer modelling.