Local and Global Environmental Effects on Boundedness in LMC Clouds

The effects of feedback in molecular clouds are still not well understood. To investigate the effect of such mechanisms on the gravitational state in clouds, we study CO and ¹³CO ALMA maps of 9 molecular clouds distributed throughout the Large Magellanic Cloud. We perform noise and resolution matching on the sample, with a common resolution of 3.5” (0.9 pc at the LMC distance of 50 kpc) and use the SCIMES clustering algorithm to identify discrete substructure, or “clumps”. We supplement these data with resolution-matched Spitzer IRAC 8.0μm maps, which trace recent star formation. The clumps identified cover a range of 1-10⁵ solar masses in luminous mass and 1-10² MJy/sr in average 8.0μm surface brightness. We use cloud- and clump-scale properties to investigate additional dependence to relationships such as Larson’s laws. We find that CO clumps exhibit a correlation between clump-averaged 8.0μm and excess non-thermal line width while 8.0μm is not well correlated with CO surface brightness. In ¹³CO clumps we also find a trend between 8.0μm and excess non-thermal line width. Our analyses give insight towards the effects of local heating on clump boundedness.