An ALMA Archival Study of the Clump Mass Function in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Abstract

This thesis presents 1.3 mm and 3.1 mm continuum maps of seven star forming regions within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) as observed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA). The data were taken as part of six projects retrieved from the ALMA public archive plus one project observed specifically for this work. We developed a technique to combine Band 3 and Band 6 maps to estimate dust-only emission corrected for free-free emission contamination. We also present an automated \texttt{clean} masking script, with a listing of the code, which we adapted and used for all of the imaging in this thesis. From these observations we identify 32 molecular clumps in the LMC and estimate their total mass from their dust emission. We derive a cumulative clump mass function ($N(\geq M) \propto M^{\alpha+1}$) and fit it with a double power law to find $\alpha_{\mathrm{low}} = -1.76^{+0.07}_{-0.1}$, $\alpha_{\mathrm{high}} = -3.3^{+0.3}_{-0.6}$, and a break mass of $2500^{+700}_{-300}$ M$_{\odot}$. Comparing to the clump mass function derived by Indebetouw et al. (2013) from carbon monoxide spectral line emission for 30 Doradus-10 shows a consistent mass range of clumps between 205 $\mathrm{M}_{\odot}$ and 5740 $\mathrm{M}_{\odot}$ as well as consistency between their single power law fit and our low mass power law index. Also comparing to core and clump mass functions from several star forming regions in the Milky Way we find consistency between most of their high mass indices and our low mass index, which is where the clump mass ranges overlap.