No Arabic abstract
Using self-gravitational hydrodynamical numerical simulations, we investigated the evolution of high-density turbulent molecular clouds swept by a colliding flow. The interaction of shock waves due to turbulence produces networks of thin filamentary clouds with a sub-parsec width. The colliding flow accumulates the filamentary clouds into a sheet cloud and promotes active star formation for initially high-density clouds. Clouds with a colliding flow exhibit a finer filamentary network than clouds without a colliding flow. The probability distribution functions (PDFs) for the density and column density can be fitted by lognormal functions for clouds without colliding flow. When the initial turbulence is weak, the column density PDF has a power-law wing at high column densities. The colliding flow considerably deforms the PDF, such that the PDF exhibits a double peak. The stellar mass distributions reproduced here are consistent with the classical initial mass function with a power-law index of $-1.35$ when the initial clouds have a high density. The distribution of stellar velocities agrees with the gas velocity distribution, which can be fitted by Gaussian functions for clouds without colliding flow. For clouds with colliding flow, the velocity dispersion of gas tends to be larger than the stellar velocity dispersion. The signatures of colliding flows and turbulence appear in channel maps reconstructed from the simulation data. Clouds without colliding flow exhibit a cloud-scale velocity shear due to the turbulence. In contrast, clouds with colliding flow show a prominent anti-correlated distribution of thin filaments between the different velocity channels, suggesting collisions between the filamentary clouds.
We use 3D-PDR, a three-dimensional astrochemistry code for modeling photodissociation regions (PDRs), to post-process hydrodynamic simulations of turbulent, star-forming clouds. We focus on the transition from atomic to molecular gas, with specific attention to the formation and distribution of H, C+, C, H2 and CO. First, we demonstrate that the details of the cloud chemistry and our conclusions are insensitive to the simulation spatial resolution, to the resolution at the cloud edge, and to the ray angular resolution. We then investigate the effect of geometry and simulation parameters on chemical abundances and find weak dependence on cloud morphology as dictated by gravity and turbulent Mach number. For a uniform external radiation field, we find similar distributions to those derived using a one-dimensional PDR code. However, we demonstrate that a three-dimensional treatment is necessary for a spatially varying external field, and we caution against using one-dimensional treatments for non-symmetric problems. We compare our results with the work of Glover et al. (2010), who self-consistently followed the time evolution of molecule formation in hydrodynamic simulations using a reduced chemical network. In general, we find good agreement with this in situ approach for C and CO abundances. However, the temperature and H2 abundances are discrepant in the boundary regions (Av < 5), which is due to the different number of rays used by the two approaches.
We present a model of star formation in self-gravitating turbulent gas. We treat the turbulent velocity $v_T$ as a dynamical variable, and assume that it is adiabatically heated by the collapse. The theory predicts the run of density, infall velocity, and turbulent velocity, and the rate of star formation in compact massive gas clouds. The turbulent pressure is dynamically important at all radii, a result of the adiabatic heating. The system evolves toward a coherent spatial structure with a fixed run of density, $rho(r,t)torho(r)$; mass flows through this structure onto the central star or star cluster. We define the sphere of influence of the accreted matter by $m_*=M_g(r_*)$, where $m_*$ is the stellar plus disk mass in the nascent star cluster and $M_g(r)$ is the gas mass inside radius $r$. The density is given by a broken power law with a slope $-1.5$ inside $r_*$ and $sim -1.6$ to $-1.8$ outside $r_*$. Both $v_T$ and the infall velocity $|u_r|$ decrease with decreasing $r$ for $r>r_*$; $v_T(r)sim r^p$, the size-linewidth relation, with $papprox0.2-0.3$, explaining the observation that Larsons Law is altered in massive star forming regions. The infall velocity is generally smaller than the turbulent velocity at $r>r_*$. For $r<r_*$, the infall and turbulent velocities are again similar, and both increase with decreasing $r$ as $r^{-1/2}$, with a magnitude about half of the free-fall velocity. The accreted (stellar) mass grows super-linearly with time, $dot M_*=phi M_{rm cl}(t/tau_{ff})^2$, with $phi$ a dimensionless number somewhat less than unity, $M_{rm cl}$ the clump mass and $tau_{ff}$ the free-fall time of the clump. We suggest that small values of p can be used as a tracer of convergent collapsing flows.
We present a novel infrared spectral energy distribution (SED) modeling methodology that uses likelihood-based weighting of the model fitting results to construct probabilistic H-R diagrams (pHRD) for X-ray identified, intermediate-mass (2-8 $M_{odot}$), pre-main sequence young stellar populations. This methodology is designed specifically for application to young stellar populations suffering strong, differential extinction ($Delta A_V > 10$ mag), typical of Galactic massive star-forming regions. We pilot this technique in the Carina Nebula Complex (CNC) by modeling the 1-8 $mu$m SEDs of 2269 likely stellar members that exhibit no excess emission from circumstellar dust disks at 4.5 $mu$m or shorter wavelengths. A subset of ${sim}100$ intermediate-mass stars in the lightly-obscured Trumpler 14 and 16 clusters have available spectroscopic $T_{rm eff}$, measured from the Gaia-ESO survey. We correctly identify the stellar temperature in 70% of cases, and the aggregate pHRD for all sources returns the same peak in the stellar age distribution as obtained using the spectroscopic $T_{rm eff}$. The SED model parameter distributions of stellar mass and evolutionary age reveal significant variation in the duration of star formation among four large-scale stellar overdensities within the CNC and a large distributed stellar population. Star formation began ${sim}10$ Myr ago and continues to the present day, with the star formation rate peaking ${<}3$ Myr ago when the massive Trumpler 14 and 16 clusters formed. We make public the set of 100,000 SED models generated from standard pre-main sequence evolutionary tracks and our custom software package for generating pHRDs and mass-age distributions from the SED fitting results.
The properties of tidally induced arms provide a means to study molecular cloud formation and the subsequent star formation under environmental conditions which in principle are different from quasi stationary spiral arms. We report the properties of a newly discovered molecular gas arm of likely tidal origin at the south of NGC 4039 and the overlap region in the Antennae galaxies, with a resolution of 168 x 085, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array science verification CO(2-1) data. The arm extends 3.4 kpc (34) and is characterized by widths of ~ 200 pc (2) and velocity widths of typically DeltaV ~ 10-20 km/s . About 10 clumps are strung out along this structure, most of them unresolved, with average surface densities of Sigma_gas ~ 10-100 Msun pc^{-2}, and masses of (1-8) x 10^6 Msun. These structures resemble the morphology of beads on a string, with an almost equidistant separation between the beads of about 350 pc, which may represent a characteristic separation scale for giant molecular associations. We find that the star formation efficiency at a resolution of 6 (600 pc) is in general a factor of 10 higher than in disk galaxies and other tidal arms and bridges. This arm is linked, based on the distribution and kinematics, to the base of the western spiral arm of NGC 4039, but its morphology is different to that predicted by high-resolution simulations of the Antennae galaxies.
We examine new and pre-existing wide-field, continuum-corrected, narrowband images in H$_2$ 1-0 S(1) and Br$gamma$ of three regions of massive star formation: IC 1396, Cygnus OB2, and Carina. These regions contain a variety of globules, pillars, and sheets, so we can quantify how the spatial profiles of emission lines behave in photodissociation regions (PDRs) that differ in their radiation fields and geometries. We have measured 450 spatial profiles of H$_2$ and Br$gamma$ along interfaces between HII regions and PDRs. Br$gamma$ traces photoevaporative flows from the PDRs, and this emission declines more rapidly with distance as the radius of curvature of the interface decreases, in agreement with models. As noted previously, H$_2$ emission peaks deeper into the cloud relative to Br$gamma$, where the molecular gas absorbs far-UV radiation from nearby O-stars. Although PDRs in IC 1396, Cygnus OB2, and Carina experience orders of magnitude different levels of ionizing flux and have markedly differing geometries, all the PDRs have spatial offsets between Br$gamma$ and H$_2$ on the order of $10^{17}$cm. There is a weak negative correlation between the offset size and the intensity of ionizing radiation and a positive correlation with the radius of curvature of the cloud. We can reproduce both the size of the offsets and the dependencies of the offsets on these other variables with simple photoevaporative flow models. Both Br$gamma$ and H$_2$ 1-0 S(1) will undoubtedly be targeted in future JWST observations of PDRs, so this work can serve as a guide to interpreting these images.