NGC 300 giant dust clouds

Our final catalogue of GDCs includes 146 sources, 90 of which are associated with known HII regions. We find that the dust masses of the GDCs are completely dominated by the cold dust component and range from ~1.1x10^3^ to 1.4x10^4^M_{sun}_. The GDCs have effective temperatures of ~13-23K and show a distinct cold dust effective temperature gradient from the centre towards the outer parts of the stellar disk.

We find that the population of GDCs in our catalogue constitutes ~16% of the total dust mass of NGC 300, which we estimate to be about 5.4x10^6^M_{sun}. At least about 87% of our GDCs have a high enough average dust mass surface density to provide sufficient shielding to harbour molecular clouds. We compare our results to previous pointed molecular gas observations in NGC 300 and results from other nearby galaxies and also conclude that it is very likely that most of our GDCs are associated with complexes of giant molecular clouds.