No Arabic abstract
Formation of supermassive stars (SMSs) with mass ~10^4 Msun is a promising pathway to seed the formation of supermassive black holes in the early universe. The so-called direct-collapse (DC) model postulates that such an SMS forms in a hot gas cloud irradiated by a nearby star-forming galaxy. We study the DC SMS formation in a fully cosmological context using three-dimensional radiation hydrodynamics simulations. We initialize our simulations using the outputs of the cosmological simulation of Chon et al. (2016), where two DC gas clouds are identified. The long-term evolution over a hundred thousand years is followed from the formation of embryo protostars through their growth to SMSs. We show that the strength of the tidal force by a nearby galaxy determines the multiplicity of the formed stars and affects the protostellar growth. In one case, where a collapsing cloud is significantly stretched by strong tidal force, multiple star-disk systems are formed via filament fragmentation. Small-scale fragmentation occurs in each circumstellar disk, and more than 10 stars with masses of a few times 10^3 Msun are finally formed. Interestingly, about a half of them are found as massive binary stars. In the other case, the gas cloud collapses nearly spherically under a relatively weak tidal field, and a single star-disk system is formed. Only a few SMSs with masses ~ 10^4 Msun are found already after evolution of a hundred thousand years, and the SMSs are expected to grow further by gas accretion and to leave massive blackholes at the end of their lives.
Recent multi-wavelength observations suggest that inner parts of protoplanetary disks (PPDs) have shorter lifetimes for heavier host stars. Since PPDs around high-mass stars are irradiated by strong ultra-violet radiation, photoevaporation may provide an explanation for the observed trend. We perform radiation hydrodynamics simulations of photoevaporation of PPDs for a wide range of host star mass of $M_* =0.5$-$7.0 M_{odot}$. We derive disk mass-loss rate $dot{M}$, which has strong stellar dependence as $dot{M} approx 7.30times10^{-9}(M_{*}/M_{odot})^{2}M_{odot}rm{yr}^{-1}$. The absolute value of $dot{M}$ scales with the adopted far-ultraviolet and X-ray luminosities. We derive the surface mass-loss rates and provide polynomial function fits to them. We also develop a semi-analytic model that well reproduces the derived mass-loss rates. The estimated inner disk lifetime decreases as the host star mass increases, in agreement with the observational trend. We thus argue that photoevaporation is a major physical mechanism for PPD dispersal for a wide range of the stellar mass and can account for the observed stellar mass dependence of the inner disk lifetime.
Radiative transfer plays a major role in the process of star formation. Many simulations of gravitational collapse of a cold gas cloud followed by the formation of a protostellar core use a grey treatment of radiative transfer coupled to the hydrodynamics. However, dust opacities which dominate extinction show large variations as a function of frequency. In this paper, we used frequency-dependent radiative transfer to investigate the influence of the opacity variations on the properties of Larsons first core. We used a multigroup M1 moment model in a 1D radiation hydrodynamics code to simulate the spherically symmetric collapse of a 1 solar mass cloud core. Monochromatic dust opacities for five different temperature ranges were used to compute Planck and Rosseland means inside each frequency group. The results are very consistent with previous studies and only small differences were observed between the grey and multigroup simulations. For a same central density, the multigroup simulations tend to produce first cores with a slightly higher radius and central temperature. We also performed simulations of the collapse of a 10 and 0.1 solar mass cloud, which showed the properties of the first core to be independent of the initial cloud mass, with again no major differences between grey and multigroup models. For Larsons first collapse, where temperatures remain below 2000 K, the vast majority of the radiation energy lies in the IR regime and the system is optically thick. In this regime, the grey approximation does a good job reproducing the correct opacities, as long as there are no large opacity variations on scales much smaller than the width of the Planck function. The multigroup method is however expected to yield more important differences in the later stages of the collapse when high energy (UV and X-ray) radiation is present and matter and radiation are strongly decoupled.
We have modeled direct collapse of a primordial gas within dark matter halos in the presence of radiative transfer, in high-resolution zoom-in simulations in a cosmological framework, down to the formation of the photosphere and the central object. Radiative transfer has been implemented in the flux-limited diffusion (FLD) approximation. Adiabatic models were run for comparison. We find that (a) the FLD flow forms an irregular central structure and does not exhibit fragmentation, contrary to adiabatic flow which forms a thick disk, driving a pair of spiral shocks, subject to Kelvin-Helmholtz shear instability forming fragments; (b) the growing central core in the FLD flow quickly reaches ~10 Mo and a highly variable luminosity of 10^{38}-10^{39} erg/s, comparable to the Eddington luminosity. It experiences massive recurrent outflows driven by radiation force and thermal pressure gradients, which mix with the accretion flow and transfer the angular momentum outwards; and (c) the interplay between these processes and a massive accretion, results in photosphere at ~10 AU. We conclude that in the FLD model (1) the central object exhibits dynamically insignificant rotation and slower than adiabatic temperature rise with density; (2) does not experience fragmentation leading to star formation, thus promoting the fast track formation of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) seed; (3) inclusion of radiation force leads to outflows, resulting in the mass accumulation within the central 10^{-3} pc, which is ~100 times larger than characteristic scale of star formation. The inclusion of radiative transfer reveals complex early stages of formation and growth of the central structure in the direct collapse scenario of SMBH seed formation.
We explore the possibility of the formation of globular clusters under ultraviolet (UV) background radiation. One-dimensional spherical symmetric radiation hydrodynamics (RHD) simulations by Hasegawa et al. have demonstrated that the collapse of low-mass (10^6-10^7 solar masses) gas clouds exposed to intense UV radiation can lead to the formation of compact star clusters like globular clusters (GCs) if gas clouds contract with supersonic infall velocities. However, three-dimensional effects, such as the anisotropy of background radiation and the inhomogeneity in gas clouds, have not been studied so far. In this paper, we perform three-dimensional RHD simulations in a semi-cosmological context, and reconsider the formation of compact star clusters in strong UV radiation fields. As a result, we find that although anisotropic radiation fields bring an elongated shadow of neutral gas, almost spherical compact star clusters can be procreated from a supersonic infall cloud, since photo-dissociating radiation suppresses the formation of hydrogen molecules in the shadowed regions and the regions are compressed by UV heated ambient gas. The properties of resultant star clusters match those of GCs. On the other hand, in weak UV radiation fields, dark matter-dominated star clusters with low stellar density form due to the self-shielding effect as well as the positive feedback by ionizing photons. Thus, we conclude that the supersonic infall under a strong UV background is a potential mechanism to form GCs.
Using the Boltzmann-radiation-hydrodynamics code, which solves the Boltzmann equation for neutrino transport, we present the results of the simulations with the nuclear equations of state (EOSs) of Lattimer and Swesty (LS) and Furusawa and Shen (FS). We extend the simulation time of the LS model and conduct thorough investigations, though our previous paper briefly reported some of the results. Only the LS model shows the shock revival. This seems to originate from the nuclear composition: the different nuclear composition results in the different energy loss by photodissociation and hence the different strength of the prompt convection and the later neutrino-driven convection. The protoneutron star seen in the FS model is more compact than that in the LS model because the existence of multinuclear species softens the EOS. For the behavior of neutrinos, we examined the flux and the Eddington tensor of neutrinos. In the optically thick region, the diffusion of neutrinos and the dragging by the motion of matter determine the flux. In the optically thin region, the free-streaming determines it. The Eddington tensor is compared with that obtained from the M1-closure relation. The M1-closure scheme overestimates the contribution from the velocity-dependent terms in the semitransparent region.