The Role of Pressure in the Structure and Stability of GMCs in the Andromeda Galaxy

Abstract

We revisit the role of pressure in the structure, stability, and confinement of Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs) in light of recently published observations and analysis of the GMCs in the Andromeda galaxy (M31). That analysis showed that, in the absence of any external pressure, most GMCs (57% by number) in M31 would be gravitationally unbound. Here, after a more detailed examination of the global measurements of surface densities and velocity dispersions, we find that GMCs in M31, when they can be traced to near their outermost molecular boundaries, require external pressures for confinement that are consistent with estimates for the mid-plane pressure of this galaxy. We introduce and apply a novel methodology to measure the radial profile of internal pressure within any GMC that is spatially resolved by the CO observations. We show that, for the best-resolved examples in M31, the internal pressures increase steeply with surface density in a power-law fashion with pint ∼ Σ2. At high surface densities, many of these extragalactic GMC profiles break from the single power-law and exhibit upward curvature. Both these characteristics of the variation of internal pressure with surface density are in agreement with theoretical expectations for hydrostatic equilibrium at each radial surface of a GMC, including the outermost boundary.