Molecular clouds and star formation in the Milky Way

Using molecular line observations, this thesis studied the molecular clouds of three typical regions of the Milky Way, which are the Galactic centre, high Galactic latitudes, and the Galactic plane. The properties of molecular clouds show remarkable variations among these three regions, which explains why the star formation activities are so different

A Systematic Study of Associations between Supernova Remnants and Molecular Clouds

We universally search for evidence of kinematic and spatial correlation of supernova remnant (SNR) and molecular cloud (MC) associations for nearly all SNRs in the coverage of the MWISP CO survey, i.e. 149 SNRs, 170 SNR candidates, and 18 pure pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) in 1 deg < l < 230 deg and -5.5 deg < b < 5.5 deg. Based on high-quality and unbiased 12CO/13CO/C18O (J = 1--0) survey data, we apply automatic algorithms to identify broad lines and spatial correlations for molecular gas in each SNR region. The 91% of SNR-MC associations detected previously are identified in this paper by CO line emission. Overall, there could be as high as 80% of SNRs associated with MCs. The proportion of SNRs associated with MCs is high within the Galactic longitude less than ~50 deg. Kinematic distances of all SNRs that are associated with MCs are estimated based on systemic velocities of associated MCs. The radius of SNRs associated with MCs follows a lognormal distribution, which peaks at ~8.1 pc. The progenitor initial mass of these SNRs follows a power-law distribution with an index of ~-2.3 that is consistent with the Salpeter index of -2.35. We find that SNR-MC associations are mainly distributed in a thin disk along the Galactic plane, while a small amount distributed in a thick disk. With the height of these SNRs from the Galactic plane below ~45 pc, the distribution of the average radius relative to the height of them is roughly flat, and the average radius increases with the height when above ~45 pc.Comment: 77 pages, 20 figures, 4 tables (with machine-readable versions), accepted for publication in ApJ