Photodissociation with mechanical heating

Large velocity-gradient calculations were done as post-processing on the output of the PDR models using RADEX. High-J CO line ratios are very sensitive to mechanical heating ({GAMMA}mech hereafter). Emission becomes at least one order of magnitude brighter in clouds with n~10^5^cm^-3^ and a star formation rate of 1M_{sun}/yr (corresponding to {GAMMA}mech=2x10^-19^erg/cm^3^/s).

The Emission of low-J CO lines is not as sensitive to {GAMMA}mech, but they do become brighter in response to {GAMMA}mech. Generally, for all of the lines we considered, {GAMMA}mech increases excitation temperatures and decreases the optical depth at the line centre. Hence line ratios are also effected, strongly in some cases.

Ratios involving HCN are a good diagnostic for {GAMMA}mech , where the HCN(1-0)/CO(1-0) increases from 0.06 to 0.25, and the HCN(1-0)/HCO^+^ (1-0) increase from 0.15 to 0.5 for amounts of {GAMMA}mech that are equivalent to 5% of the surface heating rate. Both ratios increase to more than 1 for higher {GAMMA}mech , as opposed to being much less than unity in pure PDRs. The first major conclusion is that low-J to high-J intensity ratios will yield a good estimate of the mechanical heating rate (as opposed to only low-J ratios).

The second one is that the mechanical heating rate should be taken into account when determining AV or, equivalently, NH, and consequently the cloud mass. Ignoring {GAMMA}mech will also lead to large errors in density and radiation field estimates.