The initial conditions for stellar protocluster formation. III. The Herschel counterparts of the Spitzer Dark Cloud catalogue

Context. Galactic plane surveys of pristine molecular clouds are key for establishing a Galactic-scale view of star formation. For this reason, an unbiased sample of infrared dark clouds in the 10° < | l | < 65°, | b | < 1° region of the Galactic plane was built using Spitzer 8 μm extinction. However, intrinsic fluctuations in the mid-infrared background can be misinterpreted as foreground clouds.
Aims: The main goal of this study is to disentangle real clouds in the Spitzer Dark Cloud (SDC) catalogue from artefacts due to fluctuations in the mid-infrared background.
Methods: We constructed H₂ column density maps at ~18″ resolution using the 160 μm and 250 μm data from the Herschel Galactic plane survey Hi-GAL. We also developed an automated detection scheme that confirms the existence of a SDC through its association with a peak on these Herschel column density maps. Detection simulations, along with visual inspection of a small sub-sample of SDCs, have been performed to get more insight into the limitations of our automated identification scheme.
Results: Our analysis shows that 76( ± 19)% of the catalogued SDCs are real. This fraction drops to 55( ± 12)% for clouds with angular diameters larger than ~1 arcmin. The contamination of the PF09 catalogue by large spurious sources reflects the large uncertainties associated to the construction of the 8 μm background emission, a key stage in identiying SDCs. A comparison of the Herschel confirmed SDC sample with the BGPS and ATLASGAL samples shows that SDCs probe a unique range of cloud properties, reaching down to more compact and lower column density clouds than any of these two (sub-)millimetre Galactic plane surveys.
Conclusions: Even though about half of the large SDCs are spurious sources, the vast majority of the catalogued SDCs do have a Herschel counterpart. The Herschel-confirmed sample of SDCs offers a unique opportunity to study the earliest stages of both low- and high-mass star formation across the Galaxy.

Full Table 1 is only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (ftp://130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/qcat?J/A+A/590/A72