Structure and Fragmentation of a high line-mass filament: Nessie
  An increasing number of hundred-parsec scale, high line-mass filaments have
been detected in the Galaxy. Their evolutionary path, including fragmentation
towards star formation, is virtually unknown. We characterize the fragmentation
within the Nessie filament, covering size-scales between $\sim$ 0.1-100 pc. We
also connect the small-scale fragments to the star-forming potential of the
cloud. We combine near-infrared data from the VVV survey with mid-infrared
GLIMPSE data to derive a high-resolution dust extinction map and apply a
wavelet decomposition technique on it to analyze the fragmentation
characteristics of the cloud, which are compared with predictions from
fragmentation models. We compare the detected objects to those identified in
$\sim$ 10 times coarser resolution from ATLASGAL data. We present a
high-resolution extinction map of Nessie. We estimate the mean line-mass of
Nessie to be $\sim$ 627 M$_\odot$/pc and the distance to be $\sim$ 3.5 kpc. We
find that Nessie shows fragmentation at multiple size scales. The
nearest-neighbour separations of the fragments at all scales are within a
factor of 2 of the Jeans' length at that scale. However, the relationship
between the mean densities of the fragments and their separations is
significantly shallower than expected for Jeans' fragmentation. The
relationship is similar to the one predicted for a filament that exhibits a
Larson-like scaling between size-scale and velocity dispersion; such a scaling
may result from turbulent support. Based on the number of YSOs in Nessie, we
estimate that the star formation rate is $\sim$ 371 M$_\odot$/Myr; similar
values result if using the number of dense cores, or the amount of dense gas,
as the proxy of star formation. The star formation efficiency is 0.017. These
numbers indicate that Nessie's star-forming content is comparable to the Solar
neighborhood giant molecular clouds like Orion A.
