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Register a new userPerturbation growth in accreting filaments
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We use smoothed particle hydrodynamic simulations to investigate the growth of perturbations in infinitely long, initially sub-critical but accreting filaments. The growth of these perturbations leads to filament fragmentation and the formation of cores. Most previous work on this subject has been confined to the growth and fragmentation of equilibrium filaments and has found that there exists a preferential fragmentation length scale which is roughly 4 times the filaments diameter. Our results show a more complicated dispersion relation with a series of peaks linking perturbation wavelength and growth rate. These are due to gravo-acoustic oscillations along the longitudinal axis during the sub-critical phase of growth. The positions of the peaks in growth rate have a strong dependence on both the mass accretion rate onto the filament and the temperature of the gas. When seeded with a multi-wavelength density power spectrum there exists a clear preferred core separation equal to the largest peak in the dispersion relation. Our results allow one to estimate a minimum age for a filament which is breaking up into regularly spaced fragments, as well as a maximum accretion rate. We apply the model to observations of filaments in Taurus by Tafalla & Hacar (2015) and find accretion rates consistent with those estimated by Palmeirim et al. (2013).
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We have studied the filaments extracted from the column density maps of the nearby Lupus 1, 3, and 4 molecular clouds, derived from photometric maps observed with the Herschel satellite. Filaments in the Lupus clouds have quite low column densities, with a median value of $sim$1.5$times$10$^{21}$ cm$^{-2}$ and most have masses per unit length lower than the maximum critical value for radial gravitational collapse. Indeed, no evidence of filament contraction has been seen in the gas kinematics. We find that some filaments, that on average are thermally subcritical, contain dense cores that may eventually form stars. This is an indication that in the low column density regime, the critical condition for the formation of stars may be reached only locally and this condition is not a global property of the filament. Finally, in Lupus we find multiple observational evidences of the key role that the magnetic field plays in forming filaments, and determining their confinement and dynamical evolution.
We present high-angular-resolution ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) images of N$_{2}$H$^{+}$ (1--0) that has been combined with those from the Nobeyama telescope toward OMC-2 and OMC-3 filamentary regions. The filaments (with typical widths of $sim$ 0.1 pc) and dense cores are resolved. The measured 2D velocity gradients of cores are between 1.3 and 16.7 km,s$^{-1}$,pc$^{-1}$, corresponding to a specific angular momentum ($J/M$) between 0.0012 and 0.016 pc,km,s$^{-1}$. With respect to the core size $R$, the specific angular momentum follows a power law $J/M propto R^{1.52~pm~0.14}$. The ratio ($beta$) between the rotational energy and gravitational energy ranges from 0.00041 to 0.094, indicating insignificant support from rotation against gravitational collapse. We further focus on the alignment between the cores rotational axes, which is defined to be perpendicular to the direction of the velocity gradient ($theta_{G}$), and the direction of elongation of filaments ($theta_{f}$) in this massive star-forming region. The distribution of the angle between $theta_{f}$ and $theta_{G}$ was f ound to be random, i.e. the cores rotational axes have no discernible correlation with the elongation of their hosting filament. This implies that, in terms of angular momentum, the cores have evolved to be dynamically independent from their natal filaments.
The connection between the pre-stellar core mass function (CMF) and the stellar initial mass function (IMF) lies at the heart of all star formation theories. In this paper, we study the earliest phases of star formation with a series of high-resolution numerical simulations that include the formation of sinks. In particular, we focus on the transition from cores to sinks within a massive molecular filament. We compare the CMF and IMF between magnetized and unmagnetized simulations, and between different resolutions. We find that selecting cores based on their kinematic virial parameter excludes collapsing objects because they host large velocity dispersions. Selecting only the thermally unstable magnetized cores, we observe that their mass-to-flux ratio spans almost two orders of magnitude for a given mass. We also see that, when magnetic fields are included, the CMF peaks at higher core mass values with respect to pure hydrodynamical simulations. Nonetheless, all models produce sink mass functions with a high-mass slope consistent with Salpeter. Finally, we examine the effects of resolution and find that, in isothermal simulations, even models with very high dynamical range fail to converge in the mass function. Our main conclusion is that, although the resulting CMFs and IMFs have similar slopes in all simulations, the cores have slightly different sizes and kinematical properties when a magnetic field is included. However, a core selection based on the mass-to-flux ratio alone is not enough to alter the shape of the CMF, if we do not take thermal stability into account. Finally, we conclude that extreme care should be given to resolution issues when studying sink formation with an isothermal equation of state.
The fragmentation of filaments in molecular clouds has attracted a lot of attention as there seems to be a relation between the evolution of filaments and star formation. The study of the fragmentation process has been motivated by simple analytical models. However, only a few comprehensive studies have analysed the evolution of filaments using numerical simulations where the filaments form self-consistently as part of molecular clouds. We address the early evolution of pc-scale filaments that form within individual clouds. We focus on three questions: How do the line masses of filaments evolve? How and when do the filaments fragment? How does the fragmentation relate to the line masses of the filaments? We examine three simulated molecular clouds formed in kpc-scale numerical simulations performed with the FLASH code. We compare the properties of the identified filaments with the predictions of analytic filament stability models. The line masses and mass fraction enclosed in the identified filaments increase continuously after the onset of self-gravity. The first fragments appear early when the line masses lie well below the critical line mass of Ostrikers hydrostatic equilibrium solution. The average line masses of filaments identified in 3D density cubes increases far more quickly than those identified in 2D column density maps. Our results suggest that hydrostatic or dynamic compression from the surrounding cloud has a significant impact on the early dynamical evolution of filaments. A simple model of an isolated, isothermal cylinder may not provide a good approach for fragmentation analysis. Caution must be exercised in interpreting distributions of properties of filaments identified in column density maps, especially in the case of low-mass filaments. Comparing or combining results from studies that use different filament finding techniques is strongly discouraged.
We present an analysis of multi-wavelength observations of an area of 0.27 deg x 0.27 deg around the Galactic HII region G18.88-0.49, which is powered by an O-type star (age ~10^5 years). The Herschel column density map reveals a shell-like feature of extension ~12 pc x 7 pc and mass ~2.9 x 10^4 Msun around the HII region; its existence is further confirmed by the distribution of molecular (12CO, 13CO, C18O, and NH3) gas at [60, 70] km/s. Four subregions are studied toward this shell-like feature, and show a mass range of ~0.8-10.5 x 10^3 Msun. These subregions associated with dense gas are dominated by non-thermal pressure and supersonic non-thermal motions. The shell-like feature is associated with the HII region, Class I protostars, and a massive protostar candidate, illustrating the ongoing early phases of star formation (including massive stars). The massive protostar is found toward the position of the 6.7 GHz methanol maser, and is associated with outflow activity. Five parsec-scale filaments are identified in the column density and molecular maps, and appear to be radially directed to the dense parts of the shell-like feature. This configuration is referred to as a hub-filament system. Significant velocity gradients (0.8-1.8 km/s/pc) are observed along each filament, suggesting that the molecular gas flows towards the central hub along the filaments. Overall, our observational findings favor a global non-isotropic collapse scenario as discussed in Motte et al. (2018), which can explain the observed morphology and star formation in and around G18.88-0.49.
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