Radiation-Hydrodynamic Simulations of Collapse and Fragmentation in Massive Protostellar Cores

By Mark R. Krumholz, Richard Klein, C. McKee. 2006

314 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We simulate the early stages of the evolution of turbulent, virialized, high-mass protostellar cores, with primary attention to how cores fragment and whether they form a small or large number of protostars. Our simulations use the Orion adaptive mesh refinement code to follow the collapse from ~0.1 pc scales to ~10 AU scales, for durations that cover the main fragmentation phase, using three-dimensional gravito-radiation hydrodynamics. We find that for a wide range of initial conditions radiation feedback from accreting protostars inhibits the formation of fragments, so that the vast majority of the collapsed mass accretes onto one or a few objects. Most of the fragmentation that does occur takes place in massive, self-shielding disks. These are driven to gravitational instability by rapid accretion, producing rapid mass and angular momentum transport that allows most of the gas to accrete onto the central star rather than forming fragments. In contrast, a control run using the same initial conditions but an isothermal equation of state produces much more fragmentation, both in and out of the disk. We conclude that massive cores with observed properties are not likely to fragment into many stars, so that, at least at high masses, the core mass function probably determines the stellar initial mass function. Our results also demonstrate that simulations of massive star-forming regions that do not include radiative transfer, and instead rely on a barotropic equation of state or optically thin heating and cooling curves, are likely to produce misleading results.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67566533eea939409c1f082581eff3eaa2151a00

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Citations in the corpus

DYNAMICAL MASS SEGREGATION ON A VERY SHORT TIMESCALE (2009, background): “In particular, are the masses of the most massive stars set by the mass of the core in which they form (e.g., Krumholz et al. 2007), or by competitively accreting mass due to a favorable position in the cluster (e.g., Bonnell et al. 1998; see also Krumholz et al. 2005, and Bonnell & Bate 2006)?”
THE FORMATION OF LOW-MASS BINARY STAR SYSTEMS VIA TURBULENT FRAGMENTATION (2010, background): “However, both simulations and analytic work predict that the more massive disks around high-mass stars undergo fragmentation leading to additional stellar companions (Kratter & Matzner 2006; Krumholz et al. 2007).”
Initial highlights of the HOBYS key program, the Herschel imaging survey of OB young stellar objects (2010, background): “Large surveys covering the far-infrared to (sub)millimeter continuum regime are required to improve the statistics of present studies and constrain models proposed for the formation of high-mass stars (e.g. Krumholz et al. 2007; Bonnell & Bate 2006).”
EVOLUTION OF MASSIVE PROTOSTARS VIA DISK ACCRETION (2010, background): “So far, various formation scenarios, such as monolithic collapse of massive dense cores (e.g., Yorke & Sonnhalter 2002; McKee & Tan 2002, 2003; Krumholz et al. 2007, 2009), and the competitive accretion with global infall of the cluster-forming clumps (e.g., Bonnell et al. 1998; Bonnell, Vine &…”
COLLAPSE OF MASSIVE MAGNETIZED DENSE CORES USING RADIATION MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMICS: EARLY FRAGMENTATION INHIBITION (2011, background): “For instance, isothermal simulations (e.g., Bonnell et al. 2001; Bonnell & Bate 2006) and radiative calculations (Krumholz et al. 2007, 2009), magnetized ones (Wang et al. 2010; Hennebelle et al. 2011; Peters et al. 2011; Seifried et al. 2011) and even calculations including radiative ionization…”
STELLAR ABUNDANCES IN THE SOLAR NEIGHBORHOOD: THE HYPATIA CATALOG (2014, background): “…interstellar medium (Truran & Cameron 1971; Tinsley 1980; Matteucci & Greggio 1986; Lambert 1989; Wheeler et al. 1989; Timmes et al. 1995; Goswami & Prantzos 2000; Gibson et al. 2003; Kobayashi et al. 2006; Krumholz et al. 2007; Prantzos 2008; Romano et al. 2010; Kobayashi & Nakasato 2011).”
MODELING COLLAPSE AND ACCRETION IN TURBULENT GAS CLOUDS: IMPLEMENTATION AND COMPARISON OF SINK PARTICLES IN AMR AND SPH (2010, methodology): “Our models did not take into account the effects of radiation transfer, which is ex- pected to suppress fragmentation (Krumholz et al. 2007; Bate 2009).”
RADIATION-HYDRODYNAMIC SIMULATIONS OF THE FORMATION OF ORION-LIKE STAR CLUSTERS. II. THE INITIAL MASS FUNCTION FROM WINDS, TURBULENCE, AND RADIATION (2012, methodology): “…whether it be an imposed equation of state (e.g. Bate & Bonnell 2005; Jappsen et al. 2005) or the inclusion of radiative transfer, either without (Bate 2009b, 2012) or with (Krumholz et al. 2007a, 2010, 2011; Offner et al. 2009; Urban et al. 2010) the further step of including stellar radiation.”
THE PROPERTIES OF MASSIVE, DENSE CLUMPS: MAPPING SURVEYS OF HCN AND CS (2010, methodology): “Recent simulations including radiative feedback from forming protostars found that the extreme fragmentation found in earlier, isothermal simulations was greatly suppressed, allowing more massive stars to form (Krumholz et al. 2007, Urban et al. 2010, Krumholz et al. 2010).”
CIRCUMVENTING THE RADIATION PRESSURE BARRIER IN THE FORMATION OF MASSIVE STARS VIA DISK ACCRETION (2010, methodology): “A comparison of our achieved resolution to previous massive prestellar core collapse simulations by Yorke & Sonnhalter (2002) and Krumholz et al. (2007, 2009) is given in Table 1.”
Equations and Algorithms for Mixed-frame Flux-limited Diffusion Radiation Hydrodynamics (2006, methodology): “In contrast, an example of a system in the static diffusion limit is a relatively cool, dusty, outer accretion disk around a forming massive protostar, as studied e.g. by Krumholz et al. (2007).”
How do massive black holes get their gas (2009, background): “…from https://academ ic.oup.com /m nras/article-abstract/407/3/1529/1067895 by C alifornia Institute of Technology user on 21 M ay 2020 et al. 2006; Krumholz et al. 2007), particularly the case in which the cooling time is sufficiently long such that continued cooling is offset by gravitational…”
Physical Processes in the Interstellar Medium (2014, background): “The assumed cooling curves typically ignore the influence of protostellar radiation on the temperature of the gas, which simulations show can reduce fragmentation (Krumholz et al., 2007a; Commerçon et al., 2011; Peters et al., 2010b, 2011).”
THE RUNTS OF THE LITTER: WHY PLANETS FORMED THROUGH GRAVITATIONAL INSTABILITY CAN ONLY BE FAILED BINARY STARS (2009, methodology): “We note that simulations of isothermal disks do develop GI, exhibit GI-driven transport and fragment (Krumholz et al. 2007; Kratter et al. 2010), but they do not appear particularly turbulent.”
SOUTHERN MASSIVE STARS AT HIGH ANGULAR RESOLUTION: OBSERVATIONAL CAMPAIGN AND COMPANION DETECTION (2014, background): “High infall rates can lead to massive, gravitationally unstable disks, which in turn fragment to produce one or more bound objects that typically grow to stellar masses (Kratter & Matzner 2006; Krumholz et al. 2007; Kratter et al. 2010).”