The effect of magnetic fields on star cluster formation

By Daniel J. Price, Matthew R. Bate. 2008

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the effect of magnetic fields on star cluster formation by performing simulations following the self-gravitating collapse of a turbulent molecular cloud to form stars in ideal magnetohydrodynamics. The collapse of the cloud is computed for global mass-to-flux ratios of ∞, 20, 10, 5 and 3, i.e. using both weak and strong magnetic fields. Whilst even at very low strengths the magnetic field is able to significantly influence the star formation process, for magnetic fields with plasma β< 1 the results are substantially different to the hydrodynamic case. In these cases we find large-scale magnetically supported voids imprinted in the cloud structure; anisotropic turbulent motions and column density striations aligned with the magnetic field lines, both of which have recently been observed in the Taurus molecular cloud. We also find strongly suppressed accretion in the magnetized runs, leading to up to a 75 per cent reduction in the amount of mass converted into stars over the course of the calculations and a more quiescent mode of star formation. There is also some indication that the relative formation efficiency of brown dwarfs is lower in the strongly magnetized runs due to a reduction in the importance of protostellar ejections.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2a25178dda98cb80e7aaab149a3a07639806012b

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Citations in the corpus

Stellar, brown dwarf and multiple star properties from a radiation hydrodynamical simulation of star cluster formation (2011, background): “Most recently, calculations that resolve these small scales and produce stellar groups have also begun to include the effects of additional physical processes such as magnetic fields (Price & Bate 2008), radiative transfer (Bate 2009c) and both of these combined (Price & Bate 2009).”
Analytical Theory for the Initial Mass Function: CO Clumps and Prestellar Cores (2008, background): “Both could make the IMF different from the CMF, although the magnetic field seems to reduce the fragmentation significantly (Hennebelle&Teyssier 2008;Machida et al. 2008; Price & Bate 2008).”
ANALYTICAL THEORY FOR THE INITIAL MASS FUNCTION. II. PROPERTIES OF THE FLOW (2009, background): “…do not include magnetic field, which has been shown to severely inhibit disk fragmentation (Machida et al. 2005, 2008, Hennebelle & Teyssier 2008, Price & Bate 2008) or even to prevent disk formation by magnetic braking (Galli et al. 2006, Price & Bate 2007, Hennebelle & Fromang 2008, Mellon &…”
The exciting lives of giant molecular clouds (2013, background): “The relatively low value is thought to be due to stellar feedback, which changes the dynamics and disrupts GMCs (Dobbs et al. 2011a; Vázquez-Semadeni et al. 2010) and/or magnetic fields (Price & Bate 2008; Padoan & Nordlund 2011).”
MODELING COLLAPSE AND ACCRETION IN TURBULENT GAS CLOUDS: IMPLEMENTATION AND COMPARISON OF SINK PARTICLES IN AMR AND SPH (2010, background): “The first significant steps toward this were taken in sph simulations of magnetized turbulent clouds recently (Price & Bate 2008).”
Smoothed particle hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics (2010, background): “[82–84] since one is able to form stars in the presence of”
OUTFLOW FEEDBACK REGULATED MASSIVE STAR FORMATION IN PARSEC-SCALE CLUSTER-FORMING CLUMPS (2009, background): “The grid-based code also enables us to quantify, in addition, the effects of magnetic fields, which are generally difficult to treat in SPH (see, however, Price & Bate 2008).”
Stellar, brown dwarf and multiple star properties from hydrodynamical simulations of star cluster formation (2008, methodology): “Price & Bate (2008) ran star cluster formation simulations similar to BBB2003, but with magnetic fields.”
On the diversity and statistical properties of protostellar discs (2018, background): “Magnetic pressure support can slow down the star formation rate by factors of 2–3 compared to hydrodynamical calculations (Price & Bate 2008, 2009; Wang et al. 2010; Padoan & Nordlund 2011; Federrath & Klessen 2012; Myers et al. 2014; Federrath 2015), but its affect on disc properties is unclear.”
Simulations of the grand design galaxy M51: a case study for analysing tidally induced spiral structure (2009, methodology): “…Yoshida & White 2001; Springel 2005), which has previously been applied to simulations of interacting galaxies (e.g. Cox et al. 2006; Jáchym et al. 2007), our code has predominantly been used for simulations of star formation (e.g. Bate, Bonnell & Bromm 2003; Price & Bate 2008; Bate 2009a,b).”
The importance of radiative feedback for the stellar initial mass function (2008, methodology): “Price & Bate (2008) ran star cluster formation simulations similar to BBB2003, but with magnetic fields.”
Physical Processes in the Interstellar Medium (2014, background): “It can alter how cores fragment (Price & Bate, 2007b, 2008; Hennebelle & Fromang, 2008; Hennebelle & Teyssier, 2008; Hennebelle et al., 2011; Peters et al., 2011), change the coupling between stellar feedback processes and their parent clouds (Nakamura & Li, 2007; Krumholz et al., 2007b), influence…”
THE STAR FORMATION RATE OF TURBULENT MAGNETIZED CLOUDS: COMPARING THEORY, SIMULATIONS, AND OBSERVATIONS (2012, methodology): “…scaling drawn from Gaussian random seeds as an initial condition, commonly applied in numerical star formation studies (e.g., Bate et al. 2003; Clark et al. 2005; Krumholz et al. 2007; Price & Bate 2008, 2009; Smith et al. 2008; Federrath et al. 2010a; Walch et al. 2010; Girichidis et al. 2011).”
Why are most molecular clouds not gravitationally bound (2011, background): “…clouds are typically short-lived entities (Hartmann et al. 2001; Elmegreen 2002, 2007; Ballesteros-Paredes et al. 2007) and posit mechanisms which prevent most of the gas forming stars, such as stellar feedback and magnetic fields (Vázquez-Semadeni et al. 2005; Elmegreen 2007; Price & Bate 2008).”
Turbulent molecular clouds (2012, background): “…by a factor of a few, i.e. the star–formation rate is smaller in a cloud that has a supercritical magnetic field than in the otherwise identical non magnetized cloud (Price & Bate 2008, Padoan & Nordlund 2011), although the exact physical mechanism by which this happens is not well understood.”
Magnetically Regulated Star Formation in Three Dimensions: The Case of the Taurus Molecular Cloud Complex (2008, result): “Similar spurs are seen in the recent SPH-MHD simulations of Price & Bate (2008).”
THE EFFECTS OF RADIATIVE TRANSFER ON LOW-MASS STAR FORMATION (2009, background): “Numerical simulations have demonstrated that the presence of magnetic fields may suppress disk fragmentation by supplying additional pressure support (Machida et al. 2008; Price & Bate 2007, 2008).”
A comparison between grid and particle methods on the statistics of driven, supersonic, isothermal turbulence (2010, methodology): “This is primarily because the algorithms for Magnetohydrodynamics in SPH currently being used for star formation studies (e.g. Price & Bate 2008) rely on the Euler potentials formulation of the magnetic field, that cannot be used for turbulence studies ov r multiple crossing times due to the…”