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High-spatial-resolution HI observations have led to the realisation that the nearby (within few hundreds of parsecs) Galactic atomic filamentary structures are aligned with the ambient magnetic field. Enabled by the high quality data from the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope for the Galactic ASKAP HI (GASKAP-HI) survey, we investigate the potential magnetic alignment of the $\gtrsim 10\,{\rm pc}$-scale HI filaments in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). Using the Rolling Hough Transform (RHT) technique that automatically identifies filamentary structures, combined with our newly devised ray-tracing algorithm that compares the HI and starlight polarisation data, we find that the HI filaments in the northeastern end of the SMC main body ("Bar" region) and the transition area between the main body and the tidal feature ("Wing" region) appear preferentially aligned with the magnetic field traced by starlight polarisation. Meanwhile, the remaining SMC volume lacks starlight polarisation data of sufficient quality to draw any conclusions. This suggests for the first time that filamentary HI structures can be magnetically aligned across a large spatial volume ($\gtrsim\,{\rm kpc}$) outside of the Milky Way. In addition, we generate maps of the preferred orientation of HI filaments throughout the entire SMC, revealing the highly complex gaseous structures of the galaxy likely shaped by a combination of the intrinsic internal gas dynamics, tidal interactions, and star formation feedback processes. These maps can further be compared with future measurements of the magnetic structures in other regions of the SMC., Comment: 24 pages, MNRAS accepted

Context. The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is the closest low-metallicity galaxy to the Milky Way where the dynamical state of molecular clouds can be analyzed. Aims. Our aim is to present a CO(2−1) survey at ~9 pc resolution obtained with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope in an extensive region (~0.4kpc2) of the SMC and uniformly characterize the properties of the SMC clouds. Methods. We used the CPROPS algorithm to identify the molecular clouds and estimate their main CO properties. We analyzed the characteristics of the SMC clouds by studying the scaling relations between the radii, velocity dispersions, luminosities, and virial masses. We also analyzed the mass spectrum of the SMC through the cumulative mass distribution. We used the dust-based total gas masses of SMC clouds presented in the literature to analyze the stability of the molecular clouds and also to estimate the CO-to-H2 conversion factor for the SMC. We used young stellar objects (YSOs) and HII region catalogs in the literature and IR observations in public databases to inspect the star-forming regions in the SMC. Results. We identified 177 molecular clouds within the SMC, of which 124 clouds are fully resolved with signal-to-noise ratios ≳5. We found that the CO luminosity of the identified clouds is (1.3 ± 0.2) × 105 K kms−1 pc2 (representing at least 70% of the total CO luminosity of the region) and the corresponding gas mass from virial determination is Mgas = (1.5 ± 0.5) × 106 M⊙. The scaling relationships show that the SMC clouds are (on average) less turbulent and less luminous than their inner Milky Way counterparts of similar size by a factor of approximately two and three, respectively, while for a fixed linewidth, the SMC clouds are overluminous by a factor of approximately 3.5. We found that the mass spectra of the SMC based on both the luminous mass and the virial mass are steeper than dN/dM ∝ M−2, suggesting that most of the molecular mass of the SMC is contained in low-mass clouds. Using the virial masses of the SMC CO clouds identified by CPROPS, we derived a CO-to-H2 conversion factor of αCOvir = 10.5 ± 5 M⊙ (K km s−1 pc2)−1, adopting the measured SMC CO(2−1)/CO(1−0) ratio of one. Regarding the dust clouds for which we had identified the corresponding CO emission, we determined an upper limit of the dust-based conversion factor for the SMC of αCOdust = 28 ± 15 M⊙ (Kkm s−1 pc2)−1 at 12 pc resolution. These conversion factors, determined by two alternative methods, are about 2.5 and 6.5 times larger than the canonical Galactic conversion factor. For molecular clouds where there is both a dust and a virial mass, we found that the clouds appear to be in approximate gravitational virial equilibrium. Finally, we found that about half of the clouds identified by CPROPS are associated with ongoing star formation, either YSOs or HII regions, but also that close to half the clouds are not. Most of the YSOs in the clouds are in their first evolutive stages.

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.--Full list of authors: Pingel, N. M.; Dempsey, J.; McClure-Griffiths, N. M.; Dickey, J. M.; Jameson, K. E.; Arce, H.; Anglada, G.; Bland-Hawthorn, J.; Breen, S. L.; Buckland-Willis, F.; Clark, S. E.; Dawson, J. R.; Denes, H.; Di Teodoro, E. M.; For, B-Q; Foster, Tyler J.; Gomez, J. F.; Imai, H.; Joncas, G.; Kim, C-G; Lee, M-Y; Lynn, C.; Leahy, D.; Ma, Y. K.; Marchal, A.; McConnell, D.; Miville-Deschenes, M-A; Moss, V. A.; Murray, C. E.; Nidever, D.; Peek, J.; Staveley-Smith, L.; Tepper-Garcia, T.; Tremblay, C. D.; Uscanga, L.; van Loon, J. Th; Vazquez-Semadeni, E.; Allison, J. R.; Anderson, C. S.; Ball, Lewis; Bell, M.; Bock, D. C-J; Bunton, J.; Cooray, F. R.; Cornwell, T.; Koribalski, B. S.; Gupta, N.; Hayman, D. B.; Harvey-Smith, L.; Lee-Waddell, K.; Ng, A.; Phillips, C. J.; Voronkov, M.; Westmeier, T.; Whiting, M. T.; Stanimirovic, S., We present the most sensitive and detailed view of the neutral hydrogen ( HI ) emission associated with the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), through the combination of data from the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and Parkes (Murriyang), as part of the Galactic Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (GASKAP) pilot survey. These GASKAP-HI pilot observations, for the first time, reveal HI in the SMC on similar physical scales as other important tracers of the interstellar medium, such as molecular gas and dust. The resultant image cube possesses an rms noise level of 1.1 K ( 1.6mJy beam−1 ) per 0.98km s−1 spectral channel with an angular resolution of 30′′ ( ∼10pc ). We discuss the calibration scheme and the custom imaging pipeline that utilises a joint deconvolution approach, efficiently distributed across a computing cluster, to accurately recover the emission extending across the entire ∼25deg2 field-of-view. We provide an overview of the data products and characterise several aspects including the noise properties as a function of angular resolution and the represented spatial scales by deriving the global transfer function over the full spectral range. A preliminary spatial power spectrum analysis on individual spectral channels reveals that the power law nature of the density distribution extends down to scales of 10 pc. We highlight the scientific potential of these data by comparing the properties of an outflowing high-velocity cloud with previous ASKAP+Parkes HI test observations. c The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Astronomical Society of Australia., The Australian SKA Pathfinder is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility which is managed by CSIRO. Operation of ASKAP is funded by the Australian Government with support from the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. ASKAP uses the resources of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. Establishment of ASKAP, the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre are initiatives of the Australian Government, with support from the Government of Western Australia and the Science and Industry Endowment Fund. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Observatory site. Pipeline development was tested on the OzSTAR supercomputer under the project code, oz145, which is available through Swinburne University’s Centre of Astrophysics and Supercomputing. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) through grant DP190101571. N.M.-G. acknowledges the support of the ARC through Future Fellowship FT150100024. G. A. and J. F. G. acknowledge support from the State Agency for Research (10.13039/501100011033) of the Spanish MCIU, through grants AYA2017-84390-C2-1-R and PID2020-114461GB-I00 (co-funded by FEDER) and the ‘Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa’ award for the Instituto de Astrofsica de Andaluca (SEV-2017-0709). C. E. M. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST-1801471.

We present results of a wide-field (approximately 60 x 90 pc) ALMA mosaic of CO(2-1) and $^{13}$CO(2-1) emission from the molecular cloud associated with the 30 Doradus star-forming region. Three main emission complexes, including two forming a bowtie-shaped structure extending northeast and southwest from the central R136 cluster, are resolved into complex filamentary networks. Consistent with previous studies, we find that the central region of the cloud has higher line widths at fixed size relative to the rest of the molecular cloud and to other LMC clouds, indicating an enhanced level of turbulent motions. However, there is no clear trend in gravitational boundedness (as measured by the virial parameter) with distance from R136. Structures observed in $^{13}$CO are spatially coincident with filaments and are close to a state of virial equilibrium. In contrast, CO structures vary greatly in virialization, with low CO surface brightness structures outside of the main filamentary network being predominantly unbound. The low surface brightness structures constitute ~10% of the measured CO luminosity; they may be shredded remnants of previously star-forming gas clumps, or alternatively the CO-emitting parts of more massive, CO-dark structures., 24 pages; published in ApJ on 15 Jun 2022; associated data can be found at https://doi.org/10.13012/B2IDB-1671495_V1