Two mass distributions in the L 1641 molecular clouds: The Herschel connection of dense cores and filaments in Orion A

Abstract

We present Herschel survey maps of the L 1641 molecular clouds in Orion A. We extracted both the filaments and dense cores in the region. We identified which of the dense sources are proto- or pre-stellar, and studied their association with the identified filaments. We find that although most (71%) of the pre-stellar sources are located on filaments there, is still a significant fraction of sources not associated with such structures. We find that these two populations (on and off the identified filaments) have distinctly different mass distributions. The mass distribution of the sources on the filaments is found to peak at 4 M⊙ and drives the shape of the core mass function (CMF) at higher masses, which we fit with a power law of the form dN/dlogM ∝ M-1.4 ± 0.4. The mass distribution of the sources off the filaments, on the other hand, peaks at 0.8 M⊙ and leads to a flattening of the CMF at masses lower than ∼4 M⊙. We postulate that this difference between the mass distributions is due to the higher proportion of gas that is available in the filaments, rather than in the diffuse cloud. © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.