Relationship between molecular cloud structure and density PDFs

Volume and column density PDFs in molecular clouds are important di- agnostics for understanding their general structure. We developed a novel approach to trace the cloud structure by varying the lower PDF cut-off and exploring a sug- gested mass-density relationship with a power-law index x ' . The correspondence of xas a function of spatial scale to the slope of the high-density PDF tail is studied. To validate the proposed model, we use results from hydrodynamical simulations of a turbulent self-gravitating cloud and recent data on dust continuum emission from the Planck mission.