Filamentary collapse flow in molecular clouds

Abstract

We present idealized numerical simulations of prestellar gravitational collapse of a moderate initial filamentary perturbation with an additional central ellipsoidal enhancement (a core) considering a uniform, and a stratified background, the latter representing flattened clouds. Both simulations maintain the filamentary structure during the collapse, developing a hierarchical accretion flow from the cloud to the plane; from there to the filament, and from the filament to the core. The flow changes direction smoothly at every step of the hierarchy, with no density divergence nor a shock developing at the filament's axis during the studied prestellar evolution. The flow drives accretion onto the central core and drains material from the filament, slowing down the growth of the latter. As a consequence, the ratio of the central density of the core to the filament density increases in time, diverging at the time of singularity formation in the core. The stratified simulation produces the best match for observed Plummer-like radial column density profiles of filaments, while the uniform simulation does not produce a flat central density profile. This result supports recent suggestions that MCs may be preferentially flattened structures. We examine the possibility that the filamentary flow might approach a quasi-stationary regime in which the radial accretion onto the filament is balanced by the longitudinal accretion onto the core. A simple argument suggests that such a stationary state may be an attractor for the system. Our simulations, do not attain this stationary stage, but appear to be approaching it during the prestellar stage.

A Comprehensive Study of the Young Cluster IRAS 05100+3723: Properties, Surrounding Interstellar Matter, and Associated Star Formation

“…As shown in Figure 22, the distribution of the 13 CO intensity suggests that the cluster lies at the end of a filamentary cloud. It is generally hypothesized that star-forming clouds collapse to lower-dimensional structures, producing first sheets and then filaments (Lin et al 1965;Burkert & Hartmann 2004;Gómez & Vázquez-Semadeni 2014;Naranjo-Romero et al 2020). Simulations show that such clouds experience highly non-linear gravitational acceleration as a function of position, causing the material to pile up near the cloud edge, forming a young cluster like Orion (e.g.…”