CONNECTING THE DOTS: ANALYZING SYNTHETIC OBSERVATIONS OF STAR-FORMING CLUMPS IN MOLECULAR CLOUDS

In this paper, we investigate the extent to which observations of molecular clouds can correctly identify and measure star-forming clumps. We produced a synthetic column density map and a synthetic spectral-line data cube from the simulated collapse of a 5000 M☉ molecular cloud. By correlating the clumps found in the simulation to those found in the synthetic observations, clump masses derived from spectral-line data cubes were found to be …