Mapping the column density and dust temperature structure of IRDCs with
  Herschel
  Infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) are cold and dense reservoirs of gas potentially
available to form stars. Many of these clouds are likely to be pristine
structures representing the initial conditions for star formation. The study
presented here aims to construct and analyze accurate column density and dust
temperature maps of IRDCs by using the first Herschel data from the Hi-GAL
galactic plane survey. These fundamental quantities, are essential for
understanding processes such as fragmentation in the early stages of the
formation of stars in molecular clouds. We have developed a simple
pixel-by-pixel SED fitting method, which accounts for the background emission.
By fitting a grey-body function at each position, we recover the spatial
variations in both the dust column density and temperature within the IRDCs.
This method is applied to a sample of 22 IRDCs exhibiting a range of angular
sizes and peak column densities. Our analysis shows that the dust temperature
decreases significantly within IRDCs, from background temperatures of 20-30 K
to minimum temperatures of 8-15 K within the clouds, showing that dense
molecular clouds are not isothermal. Temperature gradients have most likely an
important impact on the fragmentation of IRDCs. Local temperature minima are
strongly correlated with column density peaks, which in a few cases reach NH2 =
1 x 10^{23} cm^{-2}, identifying these clouds as candidate massive prestellar
cores. Applying this technique to the full Hi-GAL data set will provide
important constraints on the fragmentation and thermal properties of IRDCs, and
help identify hundreds of massive prestellar core candidates.
