PROJECT DESCRIPTION STATE OF THE ART AND PRELIMINARY WORK Here comes the state of the art. [Text] Project-related publications Articles published by outlets with scientific quality assurance, book publications, and works accepted for publication but not yet published here own publications Other publications Patents not applicable

The classical picture of a star-forming filament is a near-equilibrium structure, with collapse dependent on its gravitational criticality. Recent observations have complicated this picture, revealing filaments as a mess of apparently interacting subfilaments, with transsonic internal velocity dispersions and mildly supersonic intra-subfilament dispersions. How structures like this form is unresolved. Here we study the velocity structure of filamentary regions in a simulation of a turbulent molecular cloud. We present two main findings: first, the observed complex velocity features in filaments arise naturally in self gravitating hydrodynamic simulations of turbulent clouds without the need for magnetic or other effects. Second, a region that is filamentary only in projection and is in fact made of spatially distinct features can displays these same velocity characteristics. The fact that these disjoint structures can masquerade as coherent filaments in both projection and velocity diagnostics highlights the need to continue developing sophisticated filamentary analysis techniques for star formation observations.

ABSTRACT The very long, thin infrared dark cloud Nessie is even longer than had been previously claimed, and an analysis of its Galactic location suggests that it lies directly in the Milky Way’s mid-plane, tracing out a highly elongated bone-like feature within the prominent Scutum-Centaurus spiral arm. Re-analysis of mid-infrared imagery from the Spitzer Space Telescope shows that this IRDC is at least 2, and possibly as many as 8 times longer than had originally been claimed by Nessie’s discoverers, ; its aspect ratio is therefore at least 150:1, and possibly as large as 800:1. A careful accounting for both the Sun’s offset from the Galactic plane (∼25 pc) and the Galactic center’s offset from the (lII, bII)=(0, 0) position defined by the IAU in 1959 shows that the latitude of the true Galactic mid-plane at the 3.1 kpc distance to the Scutum-Centaurus Arm is not b = 0, but instead closer to b = −0.5, which is the latitude of Nessie to within a few pc. Apparently, Nessie lies _in_ the Galactic mid-plane. An analysis of the radial velocities of low-density (CO) and high-density (${\rm NH}_3$) gas associated with the Nessie dust feature suggests that Nessie runs along the Scutum-Centaurus Arm in position-position-velocity space, which means it likely forms a dense ‘spine’ of the arm in real space as well. No galaxy-scale simulation to date has the spatial resolution to predict a Nessie-like feature, but extant simulations do suggest that highly elongated over-dense filaments should be associated with a galaxy’s spiral arms. Nessie is situated in the closest major spiral arm to the Sun toward the inner Galaxy, and appears almost perpendicular to our line of sight, making it the easiest feature of its kind to detect from our location (a shadow of an Arm’s bone, illuminated by the Galaxy beyond). Although the Sun’s (∼25 pc) offset from the Galactic plane is not large in comparison with the half-thickness of the plane as traced by Population I objects such as GMCs and HII regions (∼200 pc; ), it may be significant compared with an extremely thin layer that might be traced out by Nessie-like “bones” of the Milky Way. Future high-resolution extinction and molecular line data may therefore allow us to exploit the Sun’s position above the plane to gain a (very foreshortened) view “from above" of dense gas in Milky Way’s disk and its structure.