The TolTEC Clouds to Cores Legacy Survey

All images credit: the Herschel Gould Belt Legacy Survey, except for Auriga-California (Harvey et al. 2013), Orion A (Stutz & Kainulainen 2015), MonR2 (Pokhrel et al. 2016), CepOB3 and Cygnus-X (Pokhrel et al. in prep.).

The TolTEC Clouds to Cores Working Group (C2C-WG) is a panel of experts in molecular cloud and star formation research that is charged with helping the TolTEC team to plan our survey for maximum utility to the research community. Members of the C2C-WG recommended candidate targets, and the group pruned the list to the ten shown below.

Mapping sections are marked in blue below, and tally to about 89 sq. degrees, or 160 full moons on the sky. Mapping speed estimates will be uncertain by a factor of six until TolTEC is deployed to LMT. Our contingency scheme for these draft maps is to classify the map sections as high or low priority with roughly equal coverage in each within each cloud target. Dropping low priority fields would thus allow us to account for the first factor of two in potential mapping efficiency reduction. Up to the next factor of three would then be accounted for by reducing the survey sensitivity. In that case, the lower mass limit for the resultant dense core census would increase by a factor of about 1.7.