Structural Analysis of Molecular Clouds: Dendrograms

Understand

We demonstrate the utility of dendrograms at representing the essential features of the hierarchical structure of the isosurfaces for molecular line data cubes.

• The dendrogram of a data cube is an abstraction of the changing topology of the isosurfaces as a function of contour level.
• The ability to track hierarchical structure over a range of scales makes this analysis philosophically different from local segmentation algorithms like CLUMPFIND.
• Points in the dendrogram structure correspond to specific volumes in data cubes defined by their bounding isosurfaces.