THE INTERPLAY OF MAGNETIC FIELDS, FRAGMENTATION, AND IONIZATION FEEDBACK IN HIGH-MASS STAR FORMATION

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

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Massive stars disproportionately influence their surroundings. How they form has only started to become clear recently through radiation gas dynamical simulations. However, until now, no simulation has simultaneously included both magnetic fields and ionizing radiation. Here we present the results from the first radiation-magnetohydrodynamical (RMHD) simulation including ionization feedback, comparing an RMHD model of a 1000 M☉ rotating cloud to earlier radiation gas dynamical models with the same initial density and velocity distributions. We find that, despite starting with a strongly supercritical mass-to-flux ratio, the magnetic field has three effects. First, the field offers locally support against gravitational collapse in the accretion flow, substantially reducing the amount of secondary fragmentation in comparison to the gas dynamical case. Second, the field drains angular momentum from the collapsing gas, further increasing the amount of material available for accretion by the central, massive, protostar, and thus increasing its final mass by about 50% from the purely gas dynamical case. Third, the field is wound up by the rotation of the flow, driving a tower flow. However, this flow never achieves the strength seen in low-mass star formation simulations for two reasons: gravitational fragmentation disrupts the circular flow in the central regions where the protostars form, and the expanding H ii regions tend to further disrupt the field geometry. Therefore, ionizing radiation is likely to dominate outflow dynamics in regions of massive star formation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

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On the universality of supersonic turbulence (2013, background): “…https://academ ic.oup.com /m nras/article-abstract/436/2/1245/1126116 by guest on 15 N ovem ber 2019 Breitschwerdt et al. 2009; Goldbaum et al. 2011; Peters et al. 2011; Lee, Murray & Rahman 2012), gravitational collapse and accretion of material (Vazquez-Semadeni, Canto & Lizano 1998; Elmegreen &…”
A NEW JEANS RESOLUTION CRITERION FOR (M)HD SIMULATIONS OF SELF-GRAVITATING GAS: APPLICATION TO MAGNETIC FIELD AMPLIFICATION BY GRAVITY-DRIVEN TURBULENCE (2011, background): “However, even before that stage, the turbulent dynamo may have amplified the magnetic field enough that it could reduce or even suppress fragmenta- 5 See also Beuther et al. (2010) for a recent observational study on IRAS 18089–1732, in which –as in our simulations– the turbulent energies are still ”
Importance of the Initial Conditions for Star Formation - I. Cloud Evolution and Morphology (2010, background): “Banerjee et al. (2009), Peters et al. (2011) and Hennebelle et al. (2011) noted reduced fragmentation in high-mass cores.”
FORMATION OF MASSIVE MOLECULAR CLOUD CORES BY CLOUD–CLOUD COLLISION (2013, background): “However, Peters et al. (2011) and Hen- nebelle et al. (2011) showed that the level of fragmentation is reduced typically only by a factor of 2.”
COLLAPSE OF MASSIVE MAGNETIZED DENSE CORES USING RADIATION MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMICS: EARLY FRAGMENTATION INHIBITION (2011, methodology): “Contrary to previous lower resolution studies (Krumholz et al. 2007, 2009; Peters et al. 2011), the secondary fragment is not produced by disk fragmentation, but rather by collapse along a filamentary structure.”
Dispersal of molecular clouds by ionizing radiation (2012, background): “Quenching of feedback by strong accretion is also important in the early stages of Hii region formation, i.e. in the ultra-compact stage (Mac Low et al. 2007; Peters et al. 2010, 2011).”
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…”
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…”
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).”
Titans of the early Universe: The Prato statement on the origin of the first supermassive black holes (2018, result): “This is in line with results from radiation hydrodynamic simulations of present-day star formation (see, e.g., Krumholz et al. 2009; Peters et al. 2010, 2011; Kuiper et al. 2011).”
Before the first supernova: combined effects of H II regions and winds on molecular clouds (2014, unknown): “Krumholz et al. (2007) and Peters et al. (2011) both find that magnetic fields constrain the expansion of HIIRs, at least in some directions.”
THE STAR FORMATION RATE OF TURBULENT MAGNETIZED CLOUDS: COMPARING THEORY, SIMULATIONS, AND OBSERVATIONS (2012, background): “For example, we expect the amount of accreted gas to be reduced, if feedback were included (e.g., Wang et al. 2010; Peters et al. 2011).”
The SILCC project - III. Regulation of star formation and outflows by stellar winds and supernovae (2016, background): “Eventually, newly formed massive stars (with mass >8 M⊙) strongly impact the surrounding ISM by ionizing radiation (e.g. Peters et al. 2010, 2011; ⋆ E-mail: walch@ph1.uni-koeln.de (SW); naab@mpa-garching.mpg.de (TN) Dale, Ercolano & Bonnell 2012; Walch et al. 2012, 2013; Dale et al. 2014; Geen et…”