FILAMENTARY ACCRETION FLOWS IN THE EMBEDDED SERPENS SOUTH PROTOCLUSTER

By H. Kirk, P. Myers, T. Bourke, R. Gutermuth, A. Hedden, G. Wilson. 2013

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One puzzle in understanding how stars form in clusters is the source of mass—is all of the mass in place before the first stars are born, or is there an extended period when the cluster accretes material which can continuously fuel the star formation process? We use a multi-line spectral survey of the southern filament associated with the Serpens South embedded cluster-forming region in order to determine if mass is accreting from the filament onto the cluster, and whether the accretion rate is significant. Our analysis suggests that material is flowing along the filament's long axis at a rate of ∼30 M☉ Myr−1 (inferred from the N2H+ velocity gradient along the filament), and radially contracting onto the filament at ∼130 M☉ Myr−1 (inferred from HNC self-absorption). These accretion rates are sufficient to supply mass to the central cluster at a similar rate to the current star formation rate in the cluster. Filamentary accretion flows may therefore be very important in the ongoing evolution of this cluster.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Education, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eeee8cca7ac2c276028d74c143c712e0c91cb79c

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Citations in the corpus

SDC13 infrared dark clouds: longitudinally collapsing filaments? (2013, background): “Several high-resolution studies of filamentary cloud kinematics have been performed in the past three years towards low-mass, nearby, star-forming regions (e.g. Duarte-Cabral et al. 2010; Hacar & Tafalla 2011; Kirk et al. 2013; Arzoumanian et al. 2013).”
Filament Identification through Mathematical Morphology (2015, background): “Several individual filaments and hub-filament structures have been analyzed in detail and have even been argued to be the fundamental structures in the cluster formation process (e.g., Myers 2009; Kirk et al. 2013b).”
A census of dense cores in the Aquila cloud complex: SPIRE/PACS observations from the Herschel Gould Belt survey (2015, methodology): “For this purpose, we used CSAR (Cardiff Sourcefinding AlgoRithm – Kirk et al. 2013b), a hierarchical source-finding algorithm, which we applied to the high-resolution column density map.”
Global hierarchical collapse in molecular clouds. Towards a comprehensive scenario (2019, background): “The central clumps (“hubs”) appear to accrete from the filaments, while in turn the filaments seem to accrete radially from their surroundings (Schneider et al. 2010; Kirk et al. 2013; Peretto et al. 2014; Lu et al. 2018; Williams et al. 2018; Shimajiri et al. 2019; Gong et al. 2018).”