An origin of arc structures deeply embedded in dense molecular cloud cores

We investigated the formation of arc-like structures in the infalling envelope around protostars, motivated by the recent Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of the high-density molecular cloud core, MC27/L1521F. We performed self-gravitational hydrodynamical numerical simulations with an adaptive mesh refinement code. A filamentary cloud with a 0.1~pc width fragments into cloud cores because of perturbations due to weak turbulence. The cloud core undergoes gravitational collapse to form multiple protostars, and gravitational torque from the orbiting protostars produces arc structures extending up to a 1000~AU scale. As well as on a spatial extent, the velocity ranges of the arc structures, $sim0.5,mathrm{km,s}^{-1}$, are in agreement with the ALMA observations. We also found that circumstellar disks are often misaligned in triple system. The misalignment is caused by the tidal interaction between the protostars when they undergo close encounters because of a highly eccentric orbit of the tight binary pair.

Star formation in turbulent molecular clouds with colliding flow

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.

An Implicit Scheme for Ohmic Dissipation with Adaptive Mesh Refinement

An implicit method for the ohmic dissipation is proposed. The proposed method is based on the Crank-Nicolson method and exhibits second-order accuracy in time and space. The proposed method has been implemented in the SFUMATO adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code. The multigrid method on the grids of the AMR hierarchy converges the solution. The convergence is fast but depends on the time step, resolution, and resistivity. Test problems demonstrated that decent solutions are obtained even at the interface between fine and coarse grids. Moreover, the solution obtained by the proposed method shows good agreement with that obtained by the explicit method, which required many time steps. The present method reduces the number of time steps, and hence the computational costs, as compared with the explicit method.

Protostellar collapse of magneto-turbulent cloud cores: shape during collapse and outflow formation

We investigate protostellar collapse of molecular cloud cores by numerical simulations, taking into account turbulence and magnetic fields. By using the adaptive mesh refinement technique, the collapse is followed over a wide dynamic range from the scale of a turbulent cloud core to that of the first core. The cloud core is lumpy in the low density region owing to the turbulence, while it has a smooth density distribution in the dense region produced by the collapse. The shape of the dense region depends mainly on the mass of the cloud core; a massive cloud core tends to be prolate while a less massive cloud core tends to be oblate. In both cases, anisotropy of the dense region increases during the isothermal collapse. The minor axis of the dense region is always oriented parallel to the local magnetic field. All the models eventually yield spherical first cores supported mainly by the thermal pressure. Most of turbulent cloud cores exhibit protostellar outflows around the first cores. These outflows are classified into two types, bipolar and spiral flows, according to the morphology of the associated magnetic field. Bipolar flow often appears in the less massive cloud core. The rotation axis of the first core is oriented parallel to the local magnetic field for bipolar flow, while the orientation of the rotation axis from the global magnetic field depends on the magnetic field strength. In spiral flow, the rotation axis is not aligned with the local magnetic field.

Conditions for the Formation of First-Star Binaries

The fragmentation process of primordial-gas cores during prestellar collapse is studied using three-dimensional nested-grid hydrodynamics. Starting from the initial central number density of n sim10^3 cm^-3, we follow the evolution of rotating spherical cores up to the stellar density n simeq 10^{22} cm^-3. An initial condition of the cores is specified by three parameters: the ratios of the rotation and thermal energies to the gravitational energy (beta_0, and alpha_0, respectively), and the amplitude of the bar-mode density perturbation (A_phi). Cores with rotation beta_0 > 10^{-6} are found to fragment during the collapse. The fragmentation condition hardly depends on either the initial thermal energy alpha_0 or amplitude of bar-mode perturbation A_phi. Since the critical rotation parameter for fragmentation is lower than that expected in the first star formation, binaries or multiples are also common for the first stars.