An Observational Study of the Physical Properties of Star-forming Molecular Cores

We used the 13.7 m millimeter-wave telescope of the Qinghai Station of Purple Mountain Observatory at Delingha to carry out simultaneous mapping observations in the 12CO(J = 1 − 0), 13CO(J = 1 − 0) and CO18 (J = 1 − 0) lines towards 11 isolated star-forming molecular cores selected from the sample of Spitzer's c2d program. For all three lines, these sources were all observed to the positions of half the peak intensity of the 13CO(J = 1 − 0) line. The volume density, local thermodynamic equilibrium mass MLTE and virial mass MVIR were derived for each of the molecular cores. The obtained ratio of MVIR to MLTE is 0.85 ± 0.40 for the 13CO(J = 1 − 0) cores and 0.77 ± 0.35 for the CO18 (J = 1 − 0) cores. The density profiles of the cloud cores were also calculated.