We report on a series of numerical simulations of gas clouds with self-gravity forming sink particles, adopting an isothermal equation of state to isolate the effects of gravity from thermal physics on the resulting sink mass distributions. Simulations starting with supersonic velocity fluctuations develop sink mass functions with a high-mass power-law tail dN/d log M ∝ M Γ , Γ = −1 ± 0.1, independent of the initial Mach number of the velocity field. Similar results but with weaker statistical significance hold for a simulation starting with initial density fluctuations. This mass function power-law dependence agrees with the asymptotic limit found by Zinnecker assuming Bondi-Hoyle-Littleton (BHL) accretion, even though the mass accretion rates of individual sinks show significant departures from the predictedṀ ∝ M 2 behavior. While BHL accretion is not strictly applicable due to the complexity of the environment, we argue that the final mass functions are the result of a relative M 2 dependence resulting from gravitationally-focused accretion. Our simulations may show the power-law mass function particularly clearly compared with others because our adoption of an isothermal equation of state limits the effects of thermal physics in producing a broad initial fragmentation spectrum; Γ → −1 is an asymptotic limit found only when sink masses grow well beyond their initial values. While we have purposely eliminated many additional physical processes (radiative transfer, feedback) which can affect the stellar mass function, our results emphasize the importance of gravitational focusing for massive star formation.

Sensitive high angular resolution (∼2 ) CO(2-1) line observations made with the Submillimeter Array of the flow emanating from the high-mass star-forming region DR21 located in the Cygnus X molecular cloud are presented. These new interferometric observations indicate that this well known enigmatic outflow appears to have been produced by an explosive event that took place about 10,000 years ago, and that might be related to the disintegration of a massive stellar system such as the one that occurred in Orion Becklin-Neugebauer/ Kleinman-Low 500 years ago, but about 20 times more energetic. This result therefore argues in favor of the idea that the disintegration of young stellar systems perhaps is a frequent phenomenon present during the formation of massive stars. However, many more theoretical and observational studies are still needed to confirm our hypothesis.