LIMITING ACCRETION ONTO MASSIVE STARS BY FRAGMENTATION-INDUCED STARVATION

By Thomas Peters, Ralf Klessen, M. Mac Low, Robi Banerjee. 2010

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Massive stars influence their surroundings through radiation, winds, and supernova explosions far out of proportion to their small numbers. However, the physical processes that initiate and govern the birth of massive stars remain poorly understood. Two widely discussed models are monolithic collapse of molecular cloud cores and competitive accretion. To learn more about massive star formation, we perform and analyze simulations of the collapse of rotating, massive, cloud cores including radiative heating by both non-ionizing and ionizing radiation using the FLASH adaptive-mesh refinement code. These simulations show fragmentation from gravitational instability in the enormously dense accretion flows required to build up massive stars. Secondary stars form rapidly in these flows and accrete mass that would have otherwise been consumed by the massive star in the center, in a process that we term fragmentation-induced starvation. This explains why massive stars are usually found as members of high-order stellar systems that themselves belong to large clusters containing stars of all masses. The radiative heating does not prevent fragmentation, but does lead to a higher Jeans mass, resulting in fewer and more massive stars than would form without the heating. This mechanism reproduces the observed relation between the total stellar mass in the cluster and the mass of the largest star. It predicts strong clumping and filamentary structure in the center of collapsing cores, as has recently been observed. We speculate that a similar mechanism will act during primordial star formation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e539133996f2126418855eb0e6c905d75d15a307

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THREE-DIMENSIONAL SIMULATION OF MASSIVE STAR FORMATION IN THE DISK ACCRETION SCENARIO (2011, background): “Fragmentation on larger scales potentially limits the mass reservoir of the forming star in the center (Krumholz et al. 2009; Peters et al. 2010b,c), although Peters et al. (2010a) recently have shown that a large scale magnetic field will offer locally support against gravitational collapse…”
The stellar and sub-stellar IMF of simple and composite populations (2011, methodology): “As there is no physically acceptable way that this might arise, and since in fact the work of Peters et al. (2010, 2011b) has demonstrated that feedback actually helps establish the mmax − Mecl relation, it is concluded that star formation cannot be a random process, and its outcome cannot be…”
FORMATION OF MASSIVE PRIMORDIAL STARS: INTERMITTENT UV FEEDBACK WITH EPISODIC MASS ACCRETION (2015, background): “This is because the accreting gas is divided among multiple protostars and the accretion rates onto each protostar is correspondingly reduced (e.g., Peters et al. 2010).”
Collapse, outflows and fragmentation of massive, turbulent and magnetized prestellar barotropic cores (2011, methodology): “We note that recently Commerçon et al. (2010), Tomida et al. (2010) and Peters et al. (2010d) have performed the first simulations of collapsing low mass cores at small scales with grid techniques, which simultaneously consider the magnetic field and the radiative transfer, while Price & Bate…”
ONE HUNDRED FIRST STARS: PROTOSTELLAR EVOLUTION AND THE FINAL MASSES (2013, background): “One is the reduction of the total gas mass that can be accreted onto the central star, simply because additional sinks are present (fragmentation-induced starvation; i.e., Peters et al. 2010).”
Importance of the Initial Conditions for Star Formation - I. Cloud Evolution and Morphology (2010, background): “Hence, the accretion on to the central object is starved by the fragmentation around it (Peters et al. 2010a)”
Physical Processes in the Interstellar Medium (2014, background): “The same holds when taking the effects of ionizing radiation into account (Peters et al., 2010a; Peters et al., 2010b, 2011; Commerçon et al., 2011).”
The Stellar IMF, Core Mass Function, & The Last-Crossing Distribution (2012, background): “…there can certainly be successive fragmentation on smaller scales within the cores and/or stellar accretion disks as the cores contract and form stars (which will depend on the gas thermodynamics and stellar feedback; see references above and e.g. Krumholz et al. 2009; Peters et al. 2010).”
Galaxy formation theory (2010, background): “…Eddington Tensor; 25Petkova and Springel (2009); 26Flux-limited diffusion approximation (Norman et al. 2009; see also Wise and Abel 2008b); 27Rijkhorst et al. (2006); Peters et al. (2010); 28Dolag and Stasyszyn (2008); 29Collins et al. (2009; see also Wang and Abel 2009); 30Robinson et al. (2004);”
The First Stars: Mass Growth Under Protostellar Feedback (2011, background): “Indeed, the final estimated mass of the main sink is similar to that found in Peters et al. (2010a), where they found the combination of disk fragmentation and radiative feedback led to a most-massive star of 25 M⊙.”
THE INTERPLAY OF MAGNETIC FIELDS, FRAGMENTATION, AND IONIZATION FEEDBACK IN HIGH-MASS STAR FORMATION (2010, methodology): “In addition to the effect of radiation feedback, which raises the Jeans mass locally and reduces fragmentation (see Peters et al. 2010b for a thorough discussion), fragmentation is further reduced in this simulation by the magnetic field, just as is found in models of low-mass star formation (see…”
Primordial star formation under the influence of far ultraviolet radiation: 1540 cosmological haloes and the stellar mass distribution (2015, background): “In this case, the available gas in the envelope is divided among multiple protostars, so that the stars in such a multiple system could have relatively lower masses than in the case of a single star (e.g., Peters et al. 2010; Susa et al. 2014).”