arXiv subjects

Ji Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Ji Yang.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

A wide-field CO survey towards the California Molecular Filament

We present the survey of $^{12}$CO/$^{13}$CO/C$^{18}$O (J=1-0) toward the California Molecular Cloud (CMC) within the region of 161.75$^{\circ} \leqslant l \leqslant$ 167.75$^{\circ}$,-9.5$^{\circ} \leqslant b \leqslant $-7.5$^{\circ}$, using the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) 13.7 m millimeter telescope. Adopting a distance of 470 pc, the mass of the observed molecular cloud estimated from $^{12}$CO, $^{13}$CO, and C$^{18}$O is about 2.59$\times$10$^{4}$ M$_\odot$, 0.85$\times$10$^{4}$ M$_\odot$, and 0.09$\times$10$^{4}$ M$_\odot$, respectively. A large-scale continuous filament extending about 72 pc is revealed from the $^{13}$CO images. A systematic velocity gradient perpendicular to the major axis appears and is measured to be $\sim$ 0.82 km s$^{-1}$ pc$^{-1}$. The kinematics along the filament shows an oscillation pattern with a fragmentation wavelength of $\sim$ 2.3 pc and velocity amplitude of $\sim$ 0.92 km s$^{-1}$, which may be related with core-forming flows. Furthermore, assuming an inclination angle to the plane of the sky of 45$^{\circ}$, the estimated average accretion rate is $\sim$ 101 M$_\odot$ Myr$^{-1}$ for the cluster LkH$α$ 101 and $\sim$ 21 M$_\odot$ Myr$^{-1}$ for the other regions. In the C$^{18}$O observations, the large-scale filament could be resolved into multiple substructures and their dynamics are consistent with the scenario of filament formation from converging flows. Approximately 225 C$^{18}$O cores are extracted, of which 181 are starless cores. Roughly 37$\%$ (67/181) of the starless cores have $α_{\text{vir}}$ less than 1. Twenty outflow candidates are identified along the filament. Our results indicate active early-phase star formation along the large-scale filament in the CMC region.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

Improved Measurements of Molecular Cloud Distances Based on Global Search

The principle of the background-eliminated extinction-parallax (BEEP) method is examining the extinction difference between on- and off-cloud regions to reveal the extinction jump caused by molecular clouds, thereby revealing the distance in complex dust environments. The BEEP method requires high-quality images of molecular clouds and high-precision stellar parallaxes and extinction data, which can be provided by the Milky Way Imaging Scroll Painting (MWISP) CO survey and the Gaia DR2 catalog, as well as supplementary AV extinction data. In this work, the BEEP method is further improved (BEEP-II) to measure molecular cloud distances in a global search manner. Applying the BEEP-II method to three regions mapped by the MWISP CO survey, we collectively measured 238 distances for 234 molecular clouds. Compared with previous BEEP results, the BEEP-II method measures distances efficiently, particularly for those molecular clouds with large angular size or in complicated environments, making it suitable for distance measurements of molecular clouds in large samples.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

Examinations of CO completeness based on three independent CO surveys

We report the global properties recovered by an ongoing CO survey of the Milky Way Imaging Scroll Painting (MWISP) toward the Galactic outskirts. %To better understand the observational biases, Our results are also compared to those extracted by a uniform decomposition method from the CfA 1.2 m CO survey and the FCRAO 14 m outer Galaxy survey (OGS). We find that more extended and unseen structures are present in the MWISP data. The total flux across the disk recovered by the MWISP survey is 1.6 times larger than those recovered by the CfA and OGS surveys in the case of the same resolution. The discrepancies are scaling with distance. For example, in the outermost OSC arm, the flux ratios for MWISP-to-CfA and MWISP-to-OGS increase up to 43.8 and 7.4, respectively. Nonetheless, the census of molecular gas in our Galaxy is still far from complete by the MWISP, with flux completeness of $<$58%. The total mass ratios of the tabulated molecular clouds between different surveys are similar to the CO flux ratio. The application of these ratios to the total H$_{\rm 2}$ mass of our Galaxy yields a correction factor of at least 1.4, meaning that the H$_{\rm 2}$ mass of our Galaxy should be at least 40% more massive than previously determined. Including the completeness correction, an even more significant fraction of the matter should be contributed by baryonic matter. The mass spectrum in the outer Galactic plane is better described by a non-truncating power-law with $γ$=$-$1.83$\pm$0.05, and an upper mass of $M_0$=(1.3$\pm$0.5)$\times$10$^{\rm 6}$ $M_\odot$.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

Molecular gas distribution perpendicular to the Galactic plane

We use the ~370 square degrees data from the MWISP CO survey to study the vertical distribution of the molecular clouds (MCs) toward the tangent points in the region of l=[16,52]deg and |b|<5.1deg. The molecular disk consists of two components with the layer thickness (FWHM) of ~85pc and ~280pc, respectively. In the inner Galaxy, the molecular mass in the thin disk is dominant, while the molecular mass traced by the discrete MCs with weak CO emission in the thick disk is probably <10% of the whole molecular disk. For the CO gas in the thick disk, we identified 1055 high-z MCs that are >100pc from the Galactic plane. However, only a few samples (i.e., 32 MCs) are located in the |z|>360pc region. Typically, the discrete MCs of the thick disk population have a median peak temperature of 2.1 K, a median velocity dispersion of 0.8km/s, and a median effective radius of 2.5pc. The median surface density of these MCs is 6.8 Msun/pc^2, indicating very faint CO emission for these high-z MCs. The cloud-cloud velocity dispersion is 4.9+-1.3 km/s and a linear variation with a slope of -0.4 km/s/kpc is obtained in the region of R_GC=2.2-6.4kpc. Assuming that these clouds are supported by their turbulent motions against the gravitational pull of the disk, a model of rho0(R) = 1.28exp(-R/3.2kpc) Msun/pc^3 can be used to describe the distribution of the total mass density in the Galactic midplane.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

Molecular Clouds in the Second Quadrant of the Milky Way Mid-plane from l$=$104$.\!\!^{\circ}$75 to l=119$.\!\!^{\circ}$75 and b=$-$5$.\!\!^{\circ}$25 to b=5$.\!\!^{\circ}$25

We have studied the properties of molecular clouds in the second quadrant of the Milky Way Mid-plane from l$=$104$.\!\!^{\circ}$75 to l$=$119$.\!\!^{\circ}$75 and b$=-$5$.\!\!^{\circ}$25 to b$=$5$.\!\!^{\circ}$25 using the $^{12}$CO, $^{13}$CO, and C$^{18}$O $J=1-0$ emission line data from the Milky Way Imaging Scroll Painting project (MWISP). We have identified 857 and 300 clouds in the $^{12}$CO and $^{13}$CO spectral cubes, respectively, using the DENDROGRAM + SCIMES algorithms. The distances of the molecular clouds are estimated and the physical properties like masses, sizes, and surface densities of the clouds are tabulated. The molecular clouds in the Perseus arm are about 30$-$50 times more massive and 4$-$6 times larger than the clouds in the Local arm. This result, however, is likely biased by distance selection effects. The surface densities of the clouds are enhanced in the Perseus arm with an average value of $\sim$100 M$_{\odot}$ pc$^{-2}$. We selected the 40 most extended ($>$0.35 arcdeg$^2$) molecular clouds from the $^{12}$CO catalog to build the H$_2$ column density probability distribution function (N-PDF). About 78\% of the N-PDFs of the selected molecular clouds are well fitted with log-normal functions with only small deviations at high-densities which correspond to star-forming regions with scales of $\sim$1-5 pc in the Local arm and $\sim$5-10 pc in the Perseus arm. About 18\% of the selected molecular clouds have power-law N-PDFs at high-densities. In these molecular clouds, the majority of the regions fitted with the power-law correspond to molecular clumps of sizes of $\sim$1 pc or filaments of widths of $\sim$1 pc.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

On the Beam Filling Factors of Molecular Clouds

Imaging surveys of CO and other molecular transition lines are fundamental to measuring the large-scale distribution of molecular gas in the Milky Way. Due to finite angular resolution and sensitivity, however, observational effects are inevitable in the surveys, but few studies are available on the extent of uncertainties involved. The purpose of this work is to investigate the dependence of observations on angular resolution (beam sizes), sensitivity (noise levels), distances, and molecular tracers. To this end, we use high-quality CO images of a large-scale region (25.8 <l< 49.7 deg and |b|<5 deg) mapped by the Milky Way Imaging Scroll Painting (MWISP) survey as a benchmark to simulate observations with larger beam sizes and higher noise levels, deriving corresponding beam filling and sensitivity clip factors. The sensitivity clip factor is defined to be the completeness of observed flux. Taking the entire image as a whole object, we found that 12CO has the largest beam filling and sensitivity clip factors and C18O has the lowest. For molecular cloud samples extracted from images, the beam filling factor can be described by a characteristic size, $l_{1/4}$=0.762 (in beam size), at which the beam filling factor is approximately 1/4. The sensitivity clip factor shows a similar relationship but is more correlated with the mean voxel signal-to-noise ratio of molecular clouds. This result may serve as a practical reference on beam filling and sensitivity clip factors in further analyses of the MWISP data and other observations.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

Three isotopologues CO survey of Molecular Clouds in the CMa OB1 complex

Using the Purple Mountain Observatory 13.7-m millimeter telescope at Delingha in China, we have conducted a large-scale simultaneous survey of $^{12}$CO, $^{13}$CO, and \xxco ($J$ = 1--0) toward the CMa OB1 complex with a sky coverage of 16.5 deg$^{\rm 2}$ ($221^{\circ}.5\leq l\leq227^{\circ}$, $-2^{\circ}.5\leq b\leq0^{\circ}.5$). Emission from the CMa OB1 complex is found in the range 7 km s$^{-1}\ \leq$ V$_\mathrm{LSR}\ \leq$ 25 km s$^{-1}$. The large-scale structure, physical properties and chemical abundances of the molecular clouds are presented. A total of 83 C$^{18}$O molecular clumps are identified with GaussClumps algorithm within the mapped region. We find that 94% of these C$^{18}$O molecular clumps are gravitationally bound. The relationship between their size and mass indicates that none of the C$^{18}$O clump has the potential to form high-mass stars. Using semi-automatic IDL algorithm, we newly discover 85 CO outflow candidates in the mapped area, including 23 bipolar outflows candidates. Additionally, a comparative study reveals evidence for significant variety of physical properties, evolutionary stages, and levels of star formation activity in different sub-regions of the CMa OB1 complex.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2020

Distances to molecular clouds in the second Galactic quadrant

We present distances to 76 medium-sized molecular clouds and an extra large-scale one in the second Galactic quadrant ($104.75^\circ <l<150.25^\circ $ and $|b|<5.25^\circ$), 73 of which are accurately measured for the first time. Molecular cloud samples are drawn from $l$-$b$-$V$ space ($-95 < V_{\rm LSR}< 25$ \kms) with the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm, and distances are measured with the background-eliminated extinction-parallax (BEEP) method using extinctions and Gaia DR2 parallaxes. The range of measured distances to 76 molecular clouds is from 211 to 2631 pc, and the extra large-scale molecular cloud appears to be a coherent structure at about 1 kpc, across about 40° ($\sim$700 pc) in the Galactic longitude.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2020

CO Outflow Candidates Toward the W3/4/5 Complex II: Feedback from Candidate Outflows

To date, few studies have focused on protostellar outflow feedback at scales larger than several parsecs. To address this paucity of research, we investigate the effects of feedback from CO outflow candidates on their parent clouds over $\sim$ 110 deg$^2$ toward the W3/4/5 complex and its surroundings. Our search identified 265 $^{13}$CO clouds with radii being $\sim$ 0.04 -- 17.12 pc. We estimate the turbulent support and potential disruptive effect of the outflow activities through analyzing physical properties of outflow candidates and their host clouds in terms of turbulence and gravitational binding energy. We find:(1) clouds of larger size might be less affected by feedback; (2) the possible scale break is $\gtrsim 4.7$ pc for both turbulent support and potential disruptive effect; (3) if outflows couple to dense gas where stars are forming, for clouds in the Perseus arm, a scale $\lesssim$ 0.2 -- 0.4 pc is sufficient for the energy and momentum injected by outflow activity to maintain turbulence, while for clouds in the Local arm, the scale is $\lesssim$ 0.1 -- 0.2 pc; and (4) for clouds in the Perseus arm, a scale $\lesssim$ 0.3 -- 1.0 pc is needed for outflow activity to potentially disperse material away from the natal clouds, while for clouds in the Local arm, the scale is $\lesssim$ 0.2 -- 0.6 pc.The strength of outflow activity may affect the values in the points (3) and (4). Finally, we find that outflow feedback probably possesses the power to alter the linewidth-size relation.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2020

Cuid: A new study of perceived image quality and its subjective assessment

Research on image quality assessment (IQA) remains limited mainly due to our incomplete knowledge about human visual perception. Existing IQA algorithms have been designed or trained with insufficient subjective data with a small degree of stimulus variability. This has led to challenges for those algorithms to handle complexity and diversity of real-world digital content. Perceptual evidence from human subjects serves as a grounding for the development of advanced IQA algorithms. It is thus critical to acquire reliable subjective data with controlled perception experiments that faithfully reflect human behavioural responses to distortions in visual signals. In this paper, we present a new study of image quality perception where subjective ratings were collected in a controlled lab environment. We investigate how quality perception is affected by a combination of different categories of images and different types and levels of distortions. The database will be made publicly available to facilitate calibration and validation of IQA algorithms.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Molecular Clouds Surrounding Supernova Remnant G43.9+1.6: Associated and Non-associated

Many supernova remnants (SNRs) are considered to evolve in molecular environments, but the associations between SNRs and molecular clouds (MCs) are often unclear. Being aware of such ambiguous case, we report our study on the molecular environment towards the SNR G43.9+1.6 by CO line observations. We investigated the correlations between the SNR and MCs at different velocities, and found two velocity components, i.e. $\sim$5 km s$^{-1}$ and $\sim$50 km s$^{-1}$ velocity components, showing spatial correlations with the remnant. However, no dynamical evidence of disturbance was found for the $\sim$5 km s$^{-1}$ velocity component. At the distance of the $\sim$5 km s$^{-1}$ velocity component, either near or far distance, the derived physical parameters are unreasonable too. We conclude that the SNR is not associated with the $\sim$5 km s$^{-1}$ velocity component, and their spatial correlation is just a chance correlation. For the $\sim$50 km s$^{-1}$ velocity component, dynamical evidence of disturbances, as well as the spatial correlation, indicate that it is associated with the SNR. We found that all the CO spectra extracted from the molecular clumps distributed along the border of the remnant are with broadened components presented, which can be fitted by Gaussian functions. By further analysis, we suggest that the SNR is at a near kinematic distance of about 3.1 kpc.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2020

Distances and statistics of local molecular clouds in the first Galactic quadrant

We present an analysis of local molecular clouds (-6 <VLSR< 30 km/s, i.e., <1.5 kpc) in the first Galactic quadrant (25.8° <l<49.7° and |b|<5°), a pilot region of the Milky Way Imaging Scroll Painting (MWISP) CO survey. Using the SCIMES algorithm to divide large molecular clouds into moderate-sized ones, we determined distances to 28 molecular clouds with the background-eliminated extinction-parallax (BEEP) method using the Gaia DR2 parallax measurements aided by AG and AV, and the distance ranges from 250 pc to about 1.5 kpc. These incomplete distance samples indicate a linear relationship between the distance and the radial velocity (VLSR) with a scatter of 0.16 kpc, and kinematic distances may be systematically larger for local molecular clouds. In order to investigate fundamental properties of molecular clouds, such as the total sample number, the linewidth, the brightness temperature, the physical area, and the mass, we decompose the spectral cube using the DBSCAN algorithm. Post selection criteria are imposed on DBSCAN clusters to remove the noise contamination, and we found that the separation of molecular cloud individuals is reliable based on a definition of independent consecutive structures in l-b-V space. The completeness of the local molecular cloud flux collected by the MWISP CO survey is about 80%. The physical area, A, shows a power-law distribution, dN/dA \propto A^{-2.20+/-0.18}, while the molecular cloud mass also follows a power-law distribution but slightly flatter, dN/dM \propto M^{-1.96+/-0.11}.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2020

Local Molecular Gas toward the Aquila Rift Region

We present the results of a ~250 square degrees CO mapping (+26d 4.1x10^5 Msun in the whole region. In fact, the mass of the molecular gas is dominated by the W40 giant molecular cloud (GMC) at ~474 pc (~1.4x10^5 Msun) and the GMC complex G036.0+01.0 at ~560-670 pc (~2.0x10^5 Msun), while the MCs at ~220-260pc have gas masses of 10^2-10^3 Msun. Interestingly, an ~80pc long filamentary MC G044.0-02.5 at a distance of ~404 pc shows a systematic velocity gradient along and perpendicular to the major axis of the filament. The HI gas with the enhanced emission has the similar spatial morphologies and velocity features compared to the corresponding CO structure, indicating that the large-scale converging HI flows are probably responsible for the formation of the MC. Meanwhile, the long filamentary MC consists of many sub-filaments with the lengths ranging from ~0.5 pc to several pc, as well as prevalent networks of filaments in other large-scale local MCs.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2020

A Cold and Diffuse Giant Molecular Filament in the Region of $l=41^\circ$, $b=-1^\circ$

Data of $^{12}$CO/$^{13}$CO/C$^{18}$O $J=1\to0$ emission toward the Galactic plane region of $l=35^\circ$ to $45^\circ$ and $b= -5^\circ$ to $+5^\circ$ are available with the Milky Way Imaging Scroll Painting (MWISP) project. Using the data, we found a giant molecular filament (GMF) around $l\approx38\sim42^\circ$, $b\approx-3.5\sim0^\circ$, $V_{LSR} \approx 27 \sim 40$ km~s$^{-1}$, named the GMF MWISP G041-01. At a distance of 1.7 kpc, the GMF is about 160 pc long. With a median excitation temperature about 7.5 K and a median column density about $10^{21}$ cm$^{-2}$, this GMF is very cold and very diffuse compared to known GMFs. Using the morphology in the data cube, the GMF is divided into four components among which three show filamentary structure. Masses of the components are $ 10^3 \sim 10^4 M_\odot$, with a total mass for the whole filament being about $7\times10^4 M_\odot$ from the LTE method. $^{13}$CO cores inside each component are searched. Virial parameters are about 2.5 for these cores and have a power-law index of -0.34 against the mass. The mass fraction of dense cores traced by $^{13}$CO to the diffuse clouds traced by $^{12}$CO are about 7% for all components of the GMF. We found signatures of possible large scale filament-filament collision in the GMF.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2020

Searching for Molecular Outflows with Support Vector Machines: Dark Cloud Complex in Cygnus

We present a survey of molecular outflows across the dark cloud complex in the Cygnus region, based on 46.75 deg^2 field of CO isotopologues data from Milky Way Imaging Scroll Painting (MWISP) survey. A supervised machine learning algorithm, Support Vector Machine (SVM), is introduced to accelerate our visual assessment of outflow features in the data cube of 12CO and 13CO J = 1-0 emission. A total of 130 outflow candidates are identified, of which 77 show bipolar structures and 118 are new detections. Spatially, these outflows are located inside dense molecular clouds and some of them are found in clusters or in elongated linear structures tracing the underlying gas filament morphology. Along the line of sight, 97, 31, and 2 candidates reside in the Local, Perseus, and Outer arm, respectively. Young stellar objects as outflow drivers are found near most outflows, while 36 candidates show no associated source. The clusters of outflows that we detect are inhomogeneous in their properties; nevertheless, we show that the outflows cannot inject turbulent energy on cloud scales. Instead, at best, they are restricted to affecting the so called "clump" and "core" scales, and this only on short (~0.3 Myr) estimated timescales. Combined with outflow samples in the literature, our work shows a tight outflow mass-size correlation.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2020

Site-testing at Muztagh-ata site I: Ground Meteorology and Sky Brightness

Site-testing is crucial for achieving the goal of scientific research and analysis of meteorological and optical observing conditions is one of the basic tasks of it. As one of three potential sites to host 12-meter Large Optical/infrared Telescope (LOT), Muztagh-ata site which is located on the Pamirs Plateau in west China's Xinjiang began its site-testing task in the spring of 2017. In this paper, we firstly start with an introduction to the site and then present a statistical analysis of the ground-level meteorological properties such as air temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, recorded by automatic weather station with standard meteorological sensors for two-year long. We also show the monitoring results of sky brightness during this period.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2020

Site-testing at Muztagh-ata site II: Seeing statistics

In this article, we present a detailed analysis of the statistical properties of seeing for the Muztagh-ata site which is the candidate site for hosting future Chinese Large Optical/infrared Telescope (LOT) project. The measurement was obtained with Differential Image Motion Monitor (DIMM) from April 2017 to November 2018 at different heights during different periods. The median seeing at 11 meters and 6 meters are very close but different significantly from that on the ground. We mainly analyzed the seeing at 11 meters monthly and hourly, having found that the best season for observing was from late autumn to early winter and seeing tended to improve during the night only in autumn. The analysis of the dependence on temperature inversion, wind speed, direction also was made and the best meteorological conditions for seeing is given.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2020

Site testing campaign for the Large Optical/infrared Telescope of China: Overview

The Large Optical/infrared Telescope (LOT) is a ground-based 12m diameter optical/infrared telescope which is proposed to be built in the western part of China in the next decade. Based on satellite remote sensing data, along with geographical, logistical and political considerations, three candidate sites were chosen for ground-based astronomical performance monitoring. These sites include: Ali in Tibet, Daocheng in Sichuan, and Muztagh Ata in Xinjiang. Up until now, all three sites have continuously collected data for two years. In this paper, we will introduce this site testing campaign, and present its monitoring results obtained during the period between March 2017 and March 2019.

astro-ph.IM↗