The formation of free-floating brown dwarves and planetary-mass objects by photo-erosion of prestellar cores

By A. Whitworth, H. Zinnecker. 2004

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We explore the possibility that, in the vicinity of an OB star, a prestellar core which would otherwise have formed an intermediate or low-mass star may instead form a free-floating brown dwarf or planetary-mass object, because the outer layers of the core are eroded by the ionizing radiation from the OB star before they can accrete onto the protostar at the centre of the core. We find that the mechanism is robust, in the sense that it operates under a wide range of conditions, but it is also inefficient, in the sense that a rather massive core is required to produce a single brown dwarf.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0f8ca64008d909a0eb416ddabc7912ca32a707d

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Mark R. Krumholz
2. Matthew R. Bate
3. Ralf Klessen
4. Pavel Kroupa
5. C. McKee
6. E. Ostriker
7. S. Glover
8. K. Luhman

Citations in the corpus

• Gravitational fragmentation and the formation of brown dwarfs in stellar clusters (2008, background): “One final mechanism is the photoevaporation of collapsing cores (Whitworth & Zinnecker 2004).”
• The properties of brown dwarfs and low-mass hydrogen-burning stars formed by disc fragmentation (2008, background): “Two other mechanisms that might form BDs are the photo-erosion of massive prestellar cores by nearby ionising stars (Whitworth & Zinnecker 2004), and fragmentation during the second collapse, i.e. when H2 dissociates (Whitworth & Stamatellos 2006).”
• The Formation and Early Evolution of Low-Mass Stars and Brown Dwarfs (2012, background): “Instead of ejection, photoionizing radiation from OB stars halts accretion by removing much of the envelope and disk of a low-mass protostar (Hester et al. 1996, Whitworth & Zinnecker 2004).”
• Theory of Star Formation (2007, background): “This process may produce brown dwarfs (e.g., Whitworth & Zinnecker, 2004), but more work is needed to determine if the number of such brown dwarfs is significant.”
• The stellar and sub-stellar IMF of simple and composite populations (2011, background): “Further arguments for a star-like origin of BDs comes from the detection of accretion onto and disks about very young BDs, and that the BDs and stars in Taurus-Auriga have indistinguishable spatial and velocity distributions (White & Basri 2003).”