CAFFEINE

Herschel imaging surveys of nearby Galactic clouds support a filamentary paradigm for solar-type star formation, whereby Jeans-type fragmentation of 0.1-pc wide “supercritical” filaments produces < 0.1pc prestellar cores, which subsequently collapse to “core-fed” protostars. This paradigm largely relies on the finding of a characteristic filament width ~ 0.1 pc based on Herschel results in the Gould Belt (d < 0.5kpc). There is a growing body of evidence, however, that massive prestellar cores may not exist and that high-mass protostars may be “clump-fed”, gathering mass from parsec-scale ‘hub-filament’ structures. Higher-resolution submm sur- veys are crucially needed to resolve molecular filaments and clarify the nature of high-mass star formation in massive GMCs at d > 0.5kpc. We propose to use the new submm continuum camera ArT ́eMiS on APEX, which provides a factor of 3.5 better resolution than Herschel at 350/450 μm, to achieve, for the first time, an essentially complete survey of the structure of the densest (AV > 40) molecular gas at < 0.1 pc resolution up to d ~ 3 kpc in the Milky Way (total survey area > 5 deg2). We wish to i) investigate whether fragmentation of 0.1-pc wide filaments remains the dominant mode of star formation beyond the Gould Belt, and ii) clarify where and how the transition between a “core-fed” and a “clump-fed” regime of protostellar mass growth occurs. 

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