Observational study of cloud-cloud collisions and massive star formation in molecular clouds in the Galaxy

2018 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 17H06740
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Field: Astronomy
• Research Institution: Nagoya University
• Principal Investigator: Fujita Shinji 名古屋大学, 理学研究科, 研究員 (30808118)
• Project Period (FY): 2017-08-25 – 2019-03-31
• Keywords: 天文学 / 電波天文学 / 分子雲 / 銀河系 / 分子雲衝突 / 大質量星

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Massive stars (> 8 solar mass) play an important role in the evolution of interstellar medium and galaxies. However their formation mechanism is still unclear. In recent years, many researchers, including Principal Investigator, have found that collisions between molecular clouds play a major role in the massive star formation. In this research, in addition to the individual analysis of Spitzer bubbles (a kind of star formation regions), we develop an algorithm to automatically find out the characteristics of a colliding object from huge observational data of molecular clouds by adopting image processing analysis.

Free Research Field

天文学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本研究により、効率的及び客観的に分子雲衝突のサンプルを得ることが可能となる。それらの統計的な議論や、コンピュータによる数値計算などとの比較によって、大質量星形成と分子雲衝突の関係における統一的な理解への一助となる。これは銀河の進化過程、そして天文学の大きな謎の一つであるそれらの成り立ちを知る重要な手がかりとなる。