The Role of Environment in Core Formation: Predictions for the TolTEC Clouds to Cores Legacy Survey

The TolTEC Cloud to Cores (C2C) Legacy survey aims to build a complete census of cores in 10 nearby giant molecular clouds using the TolTEC camera, a three band millimeter-wave camera for the 50 m Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT). This survey will characterize and set constraints on the low mass end of the core mass function due to the large sample of clouds and cores. As TolTEC nears completion (delivery to LMT and commissioning expected in January 2020), it is timely to explore what sorts of observable predictions we may extract from theory to guide early analysis of C2C data. Using magnetohydrodynamical simulations of star forming gas with stellar feedback and sink particles (proxies for young stellar objects (YSOs)), we present predictions of synthetic mm continuum observations at differing distances and ages to observe how core properties, including mass and size, change with differing environments and the presence of YSOs. We find a clear separation between the size of cores with and without YSOs suggesting a clear evolutionary difference in cores that host YSOs but found little to no temperature dependence on core properties. In pursuing these predictions, we found that the atmospheric filtering and core segmentation treatments have distance dependent impacts on the resulting core properties and characterize those in detail. C2C observations of clouds located at particularly close distances (150-300 pc) will need careful treatment. We present recommendations for addressing these systematic effects to reduce distance-dependent biases in core properties in C2C.