Messier 87 (M87) is one of the nearest radio galaxies with a prominent jet extending from sub-pc to kpc scales. Because of its proximity and the large mass of its central black hole (BH), it is one of the best radio sources for the study of jet formation. We study the physical conditions near the jet base at projected separations from the BH of ~7-100 Schwarzschild radii (Rsch). Global mm-VLBI Array (GMVA) observations at 86GHz ({lambda}=3.5mm) provide an angular resolution of ~50{mu}arcsec, which corresponds to a spatial resolution of only 7Rsch and reach the small spatial scale. We use five GMVA data sets of M87 obtained from 2004 to 2015 and present new high angular resolution VLBI maps at 86GHz. In particular, we focus on the analysis of the brightness temperature, the jet ridge lines, and the ratio of jet to counter-jet. The imaging reveals a parabolically expanding limb-brightened jet which emanates from a resolved VLBI core of ~(8-13)Rsch in size. The observed brightness temperature of the core at any epoch is ~(1-3)x10^10^K, which is below the equipartition brightness temperature and suggests magnetic energy dominance at the jet base. We estimate the diameter of the jet at its base to be ~5Rsch assuming a self-similar jet structure. This suggests that the sheath of the jet may be anchored in the very inner portion of the accretion disk. The image stacking reveals faint emission at the center of the edge-brightened jet on sub-pc scales. We discuss its physical implication within the context of the spine-sheath structure of the jet.
The core mass functions (CMFs) of low-mass star-forming regions are found to resemble the shape of the initial mass function (IMF). A similar result is observed for the dust clumps in high-mass star-forming regions, although on spatial scales of clusters that do not resolve the substructure that is found in these massive clumps. The region IRAS 19410+2336 is one exception, having been observed on spatial scales on the order of ~2500AU, which are sufficient to resolve the clump substructure into individual cores. We investigate the protostellar content of IRAS 19410+2336 at high spatial resolution at 1.4mm, determining the temperature structure of the region and deriving its CMF. The massive star-forming region IRAS 19410+2336 was mapped with the PdBI (BCD configurations) at 1.4mm and 3mm in the continuum and several transitions of formaldehyde (H_2_CO) and methyl cyanide (CH_3_CN). The H_2_CO transitions were also observed with the IRAM 30m Telescope. We detect 26 continuum sources at 1.4mm with a spatial resolution as low as ~2200AU, several of them with counterparts at near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths, distributed in two (proto)clusters. With the PdBI CH_3_CN and PdBI/IRAM 30m H_2_CO emission, we derive the temperature structure of the region, ranging from 35K to 90K. Using these temperatures, we calculate the core masses of the detected sources, ranging from ~0.7M_{sun}_ to ~8M_{sun}_. These masses are strongly affected by the spatial filtering of the interferometer, which removes a common envelope with ~90% of the single- dish flux. Considering only the detected dense cores and accounting for binning effects as well as cumulative distributions, we derive a CMF, with a power-law index b=~2.3+/-0.2. We resolve the Jeans length of the (proto)clusters by one order of magnitude, and only find a small velocity dispersion between the different subsources. Since we cannot unambiguously differentiate between protostellar and prestellar cores, the derived CMF is not prestellar. Furthermore, because of the large fraction of missing flux, we cannot establish a firm link between the CMF and the IMF. This implies that future high-mass CMF studies will need to complement the interferometer continuum data with the short spacing information, a task suitable for ALMA. We note that the method of extracting temperatures using H_2_CO lines becomes less applicable when reaching the dense core scales of the interferometric observations because most of the H_2_CO appears to originate in the envelope structure.
Sagittarius A*, the ~4x10^6^M_{sun}_ black hole candidate at the Galactic center, can be studied on Schwarzschild radius scales with (sub)millimeter wavelength very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). We report on 1.3mm wavelength observations of Sgr A* using a VLBI array consisting of the JCMT on Mauna Kea, the Arizona Radio Observatory's Submillimeter Telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona, and two telescopes of the CARMA array at Cedar Flat in California. Both Sgr A* and the quasar calibrator 1924-292 were observed over three consecutive nights, and both sources were clearly detected on all baselines. For the first time, we are able to extract 1.3mm VLBI interferometer phase information on Sgr A* through measurement of closure phase on the triangle of baselines. On the third night of observing, the correlated flux density of Sgr A* on all VLBI baselines increased relative to the first two nights, providing strong evidence for time-variable change on scales of a few Schwarzschild radii.
We present 15 GHz stacked VLBA images of 373 jets associated with active galactic nuclei (AGN) having at least 5 observing epochs within a 20yr time interval 1994-2015 from the MOJAVE programme and/or its precursor, the 2 cm VLBA Survey. These data are supplemented by 1.4 GHz single-epoch VLBA observations of 135 MOJAVE AGNs to probe larger scale jet structures. The typical jet geometry is found to be close to conical on scales from hundreds to thousands of parsecs, while a number of galaxies show quasi-parabolic streamlines on smaller scales. A true jet geometry in a considerable fraction of AGNs appears only after stacking epochs over several years. The jets with significant radial accelerated motion undergo more active collimation. We have analyzed total intensity jet profiles transverse to the local jet ridgeline and derived both apparent and intrinsic opening angles of the flows, with medians of 21.5{deg} and 1.3{deg}, respectively. The Fermi LAT-detected gamma-ray AGNs in our sample have, on average, wider apparent and narrower intrinsic opening angle, and smaller viewing angle than non LAT-detected AGNs. We have established a highly significant correlation between the apparent opening angle and gamma-ray luminosity, driven by Doppler beaming and projection effects.
The Galactic center 50km/s molecular cloud (50MC) is the most remarkable molecular cloud in the Sagittarius A region. This cloud is a candidate for the massive star formation induced by cloud-cloud collision (CCC) with a collision velocity of ~30km/s that is estimated from the velocity dispersion. We observed the whole of the 50MC with a high angular resolution (~2.0"x1.4") in Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array cycle 1 in the H^13^CO^+^ J=1-0 and C^34^S J=2-1 emission lines. We identified 241 and 129 bound cores with a virial parameter of less than 2, which are thought to be gravitationally bound, in the H^13^CO^+^ and C^34^S maps using the clumpfind algorithm, respectively. In the CCC region, the bound H^13^CO^+^ and C^34^S cores are 119 and 82, whose masses are 68% and 76% of those in the whole 50MC, respectively. The distribution of the core number and column densities in the CCC are biased to larger densities than those in the non-CCC region. The distributions indicate that the CCC compresses the molecular gas and increases the number of the dense bound cores. Additionally, the massive bound cores with masses of >3000M_{sun}_ exist only in the CCC region, although the slope of the core mass function (CMF) in the CCC region is not different from that in the non-CCC region. We conclude that the compression by the CCC efficiently formed massive bound cores even if the slope of the CMF is not changed so much by the CCC.
The transition between atomic and molecular hydrogen is associated with important changes in the structure of interstellar clouds, and marks the beginning of interstellar chemistry. Most molecular ions are rapidly formed (in ion-molecule reactions) and destroyed (by dissociative recombination) in the diffuse ISM. Because of the relatively simple networks controlling their abundances, molecular ions are usually good probes of the underlying physical conditions including for instance the fraction of gas in molecular form or the fractional ionization. In this paper we focus on three possible probes of the molecular hydrogen column density, HCO^+^, HOC^+^, and CF^+^. We presented high sensitivity ALMA absorption data toward a sample of compact HII regions and bright QSOs with prominent foreground absorption, in the ground state transitions of the molecular ions HCO^+^, HOC^+^, and CF^+^ and the neutral species HCN and HNC, and from the excited state transitions of C_3_H^+^(4-3) and ^13^CS(2-1). These data are compared with Herschel absorption spectra of the ground state transition of HF and p-H_2_O. We show that the HCO^+^, HOC^+^, and CF^+^ column densities are well correlated with each other. HCO^+^ and HOC^+^ are tightly correlated with p-H_2_O, while they exhibit a different correlation pattern with HF depending on whether the absorbing matter is located in the Galactic disk or in the central molecular zone. We report new detections of C_3_H^+^ confirming that this ion is ubiquitous in the diffuse matter, with an abundance relative to H_2_ of ~7x10^-11^. We confirm that the CF^+^ abundance is lower than predicted by simple chemical models and propose that the rate of the main formation reaction is lower by a factor of about 3 than usually assumed. In the absence of CH or HF data, we recommend to use the ground state transitions of HCO^+^, CCH, and HOC^+^ to trace diffuse molecular hydrogen, with mean abundances relative to H_2_ of 3x10^-9^, 4x10^-8^ and 4x10^-11^ respectively, leading to sensitivity N(H_2_)/{int}{tau}dv of 4x10^20^, 1.5x10^21^, and 6x10^22^cm^-2^/km/s, respectively.
Centaurus A, with its gas-rich elliptical host galaxy, NGC 5128, is the nearest radio galaxy at a distance of 3.8Mpc. Its proximity allows us to study the interaction among an active galactic nucleus, radio jets, and molecular gas in great detail. We present ALMA observations of low-J transitions of three CO isotopologues, HCN, HCO+, HNC, CN, and CCH toward the inner projected 500pc of NGC 5128. Our observations resolve physical sizes down to 40pc. By observing multiple chemical probes, we determine the physical and chemical conditions of the nuclear interstellar medium of NGC 5128. This region contains molecular arms associated with the dust lanes and a circumnuclear disk (CND) interior to the molecular arms. The CND is approximately 400pc by 200pc and appears to be chemically distinct from the molecular arms. It is dominated by dense gas tracers while the molecular arms are dominated by ^12^CO and its rare isotopologues. The CND has a higher temperature, elevated CN/HCN and HCN/HNC intensity ratios, and much weaker ^13^CO and C^18^O emission than the molecular arms. This suggests an influence from the AGN on the CND molecular gas. There is also absorption against the AGN with a low velocity complex near the systemic velocity and a high velocity complex shifted by about 60km/s. We find similar chemical properties between the CND in emission and both the low and high velocity absorption complexes, implying that both likely originate from the CND. If the HV complex does originate in the CND, then that gas would correspond to gas falling toward the supermassive black hole.
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a new low-frequency, wide field-of-view radio interferometer under development at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. We have used a 32 element MWA prototype interferometer (MWA-32T) to observe two 50{deg} diameter fields in the southern sky, covering a total of ~2700deg^2^, in order to evaluate the performance of the MWA-32T, to develop techniques for epoch of reionization experiments, and to make measurements of astronomical foregrounds. We developed a calibration and imaging pipeline for the MWA-32T, and used it to produce ~15' angular resolution maps of the two fields in the 110-200MHz band. We perform a blind source extraction using these confusion-limited images, and detect 655 sources at high significance with an additional 871 lower significance source candidates. We compare these sources with existing low-frequency radio surveys in order to assess the MWA-32T system performance, wide-field analysis algorithms, and catalog quality. Our source catalog is found to agree well with existing low-frequency surveys in these regions of the sky and with statistical distributions of point sources derived from Northern Hemisphere surveys; it represents one of the deepest surveys to date of this sky field in the 110-200MHz band.
We present a Stokes I, Q and U survey at 189MHz with the Murchison Widefield Array 32 element prototype covering 2400deg^2^. The survey has a 15.6' angular resolution and achieves a noise level of 15mJy/beam. We demonstrate a novel interferometric data analysis that involves calibration of drift scan data, integration through the co-addition of warped snapshot images, and deconvolution of the point-spread function through forward modeling. We present a point source catalog down to a flux limit of 4Jy. We detect polarization from only one of the sources, PMN J0351-2744, at a level of 1.8%+/-0.4%, whereas the remaining sources have a polarization fraction below 2%. Compared to a reported average value of 7% at 1.4GHz, the polarization fraction of compact sources significantly decreases at low frequencies. We find a wealth of diffuse polarized emission across a large area of the survey with a maximum peak of ~13K, primarily with positive rotation measure values smaller than +10rad/m2. The small values observed indicate that the emission is likely to have a local origin (closer than a few hundred parsecs). There is a large sky area at {alpha}>=2^h^30^m^ where the diffuse polarized emission rms is fainter than 1K. Within this area of low Galactic polarization we characterize the foreground properties in a cold sky patch at ({alpha},{delta})=(4^h^,-27.6{deg}) in terms of three-dimensional power spectra.
We present interferometric observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) of the free-free continuum and recombination line emission at 1 and 3mm of the Red Square Nebula surrounding the B[e]-type star MWC922. The distance to the source, which is unknown, is usually taken to be d=1.7-3kpc. The unprecedented angular resolution (up to ~0.02") and exquisite sensitivity of these data reveal for the first time the structure and kinematics of the nascent compact ionized region at its center. We imaged the line emission of H30{alpha} and H39{alpha}, previously detected with single-dish observations, and of H51{epsilon}, H55{gamma}, and H63{delta}, detected for the first time in this work. The line emission is seen over a full velocity range of ~180km/s arising in a region of diameter <0.14" (less than a few hundred au) in the maser line H30{alpha}, which is the most intense transition reported here. We resolve the spatio-kinematic structure of a nearly edge-on disk rotating around a central mass of ~10M_{sun}_ (d=1.7kpc) or ~18M_{sun}_ (d=3kpc), assuming Keplerian rotation. Our data also reveal a fast (~100km/s) bipolar ejection (possibly a jet) orthogonal to the disk. In addition, a slow (<15km/s) wind may be emanating from the disk. Both, the slow and the fast winds are found to be rotating in a similar manner to the ionized layers of the disk. This represents the first empirical proof of rotation in a bipolar wind expanding at high velocity (~100km/s).
