The study of the filamentary nature of the Interstellar Medium has been revolutionized by the use of ALMA’s high-resolution observations.
Regions with diffuse, extended emission are strongly affected by the interferometric filtering effects. We quantify the ALMA instrumental response on different observations of star-forming regions, where compact objects such as cores and filaments are embedded in a large amount of molecular cloud gas.
Our results quantitatively illustrate the intrinsic limitations of interferometers while observing complex extended emission. Interferometric filtering critically alter the radial profile of these sources, dramatically affecting their FWHM and the intensity peak. We demonstrate the severity of these effects both in simulations and on real ALMA datasets.
To recover from these effects we investigate different data-combination methods for ALMA adding short-spacing information (ACA + TP and/or IRAM 30m) showing significant improvement on the resulting image fidelity derived in these latter analysis.