Cluster-formation in the Rosette molecular cloud at the junctions of filaments

By N. Schneider, T. Csengeri, M. Hennemann, Fr'ed'erique Motte, P. Didelon, Christoph Federrath, S. Bontemps, J. Francesco, D. Arzoumanian, V. Minier and 72 more. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2012

276 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For many years feedback processes generated by OB-stars in molecular clouds, including expanding ionization fronts, stellar winds, or UV-radiation, have been proposed to trigger subsequent star formation. However, hydrodynamic models including radiation and gravity show that UV-illumination has little or no impact on the global dynamical evolution of the cloud. The Rosette molecular cloud, irradiated by the NGC2244 cluster, is a template region for triggered star-formation, and we investigated its spatial and density structure by applying a curvelet analysis, a filament-tracing algorithm (DisPerSE), and probability density functions (PDFs) on Herschel column density maps, obtained within the HOBYS key program. The analysis reveals not only the filamentary structure of the cloud but also that all known infrared clusters except one lie at junctions of filaments, as predicted by turbulence simulations. The PDFs of sub-regions in the cloud show systematic differences. The two UV-exposed regions have a double-peaked PDF we interprete as caused by shock compression. The deviations of the PDF from the log-normal shape typically associated with low- and high-mass star-forming regions at Av~3-4m and 8-10m, respectively, are found here within the very same cloud. This shows that there is no fundamental difference in the density structure of low- and high-mass star-forming regions. We conclude that star-formation in Rosette - and probably in high-mass star-forming clouds in general - is not globally triggered by the impact of UV-radiation. Moreover, star formation takes place in filaments that arose from the primordial turbulent structure built up during the formation of the cloud. Clusters form at filament mergers, but star formation can be locally induced in the direct interaction zone between an expanding HII--region and the molecular cloud.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/506572f96c40dcd869f3966a6784ad383032d5cd

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Citations in the corpus

The spine of the swan: a Herschel study of the DR21 ridge and filaments in Cygnus X (2012, background): “Further, intersecting filaments appear to mark sites of stellar cluster formation in the Rosette cloud (Schneider et al. 2012).”
Global collapse of molecular clouds as a formation mechanism for the most massive stars (2013, background): “1), reminiscent of hub-filament systems (Myers 2009) observed in a number of low-mass (André et al. 2010; Peretto et al. 2012) and high-mass (Schneider et al. 2012; Hennemann et al. 2012) star-forming regions.”
On the universality of interstellar filaments: theory meets simulations and observations (2015, background): “Star-forming cores appear primarily along dense filaments (Könyves et al. 2015), with young star clusters being located at their intersections (Myers 2011; Schneider et al. 2012).”
THE STAR FORMATION RATE OF TURBULENT MAGNETIZED CLOUDS: COMPARING THEORY, SIMULATIONS, AND OBSERVATIONS (2012, methodology): “…numerical simulations and observations with filament-tracking tools (e.g., André et al. 2010; Men’shchikov et al. 2010; Arzoumanian et al. 2011; Hill et al. 2011; Schneider et al. 2012) or polarization analyses (e.g., Burkhart et al. 2012) may eventually help to reveal the role of magnetic fields.”
Physical Processes in the Interstellar Medium (2014, background): “…star formation, and they show the development of a power-law tail at high column density that becomes more pronounced for more massive and more vigorously star-forming clouds (Lada et al., 2010; Kainulainen et al., 2011, 2013; Schneider et al., 2012; Schneider et al., 2014; Alves et al., 2014).”
ON THE STAR FORMATION EFFICIENCY OF TURBULENT MAGNETIZED CLOUDS (2012, methodology): “Similar structures and the correlation of star formation with filaments and their intersections have been observed in molecular clouds (e.g., André et al. 2010; Schneider et al. 2010; Arzoumanian et al. 2011; Schneider et al. 2012).”
Inefficient star formation through turbulence, magnetic fields and feedback (2015, background): “This seems to be true also for real molecular clouds to some degree (Schneider et al. 2012), but the inter-filament gas is much more disturbed and turbulent in real molecular clouds compared to the gravity-only case.”
A census of dense cores in the Aquila cloud complex: SPIRE/PACS observations from the Herschel Gould Belt survey (2015, methodology): “This method has already been used successfully to trace filamentary networks in Herschel images of nearby star-forming clouds (e.g., Arzoumanian et al. 2011; Hill et al. 2011; Peretto et al. 2012; Schneider et al. 2012; Palmeirim et al. 2013).”
WHAT DETERMINES THE DENSITY STRUCTURE OF MOLECULAR CLOUDS? A CASE STUDY OF ORION B WITH HERSCHEL (2013, background): “The spatial structure of clouds, now impressively revealed by Herschel imaging observations in the far-infrared (e.g., André et al. (2010), Motte et al. (2010), Molinari et al. (2010)), is very inhomogeneous and dominated by filaments (Arzoumanian et al. (2011), Schneider et al. (2012)).”