Speaker
Description
The internal dynamics of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) are important tracers of their evolutionary history and the processes that cause them to coalesce from the warm neutral ISM. Kinetic tomography, a class of techniques for calculating distance-resolved velocities in the ISM, is an important tool for understanding the kinematics of nearby GMCs. Using the 1.527 micron diffuse interstellar band (DIBs) in specially-targeted APOGEE-2 spectra as a tracer of the ISM velocity field, we build a kinetic tomography model of the ISM within the California GMC to explore the cloud’s global dynamics and the effectiveness of the DIBs in fine-scale kinematic mapping. SDSS-V MWM will sample similar spatial densities for many nearby star-forming clouds, enabling the comparison of GMC kinematics across masses, structures, dust properties, and star-forming histories.
