Numerical Simulation and Completeness Survey of Bubbles in the Taurus and Perseus Molecular Clouds

Abstract

Previous studies have analyzed the energy injection into the interstellar matter due to molecular bubbles. They found that the total kinetic energies of bubbles are comparable to, or even larger than, those of outflows but still less than the gravitational potential and turbulence energies of the hosting clouds. We examined the possibility that previous studies underestimated the energy injection due to being unable to detect dim or incomplete bubbles. We simulated typical molecular bubbles and inserted them into the 13 CO Five College Radio Astronomical Observatory maps of the Taurus and Perseus Molecular Clouds. We determined bubble identification completeness by applying the same procedures to both simulated and real data sets. We proposed a detectability function for both the Taurus and Perseus molecular clouds based on a multivariate approach. In Taurus, bubbles with kinetic energy less than ∼1 × 10 44 erg are likely to be missed. We found that the total missing kinetic energy in Taurus is less than a couple of 10 44 erg, which only accounts for around 0.2% of the total kinetic energy of identified bubbles. In Perseus, bubbles with kinetic energy less than ∼2 × 10 44 erg are likely to be missed. We found that the total missing kinetic energy in Perseus is less than 10 45 erg, which only accounts for around 1% of the total kinetic energy of identified bubbles. We thus conclude that previous manual bubble identification routines used in Taurus and Perseus can be considered to be energetically complete. Therefore, we confirm that energy injection from dynamic structures, namely outflows and bubbles, produced by star formation feedback are sufficient to sustain turbulence at a spatial scale from ∼0.1 to ∼2.8 pc.