A Production Mechanism for Clusters of Dense Cores
Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 1997 papers
Abstract
Collapse and fragmentation processes within filamentary interstellar molecular clouds are investigated in detail. A quasi-equilibrium filament fragments into dense cores separated by about 4 times the filament diameter. Nonlinear calculations reveal that the central region of each core tends toward spherical collapse and further hierarchical fragmentation is not expected. However, merging and clustering of cores tend to occur soon after the fragmentation. When the line mass of an isothermal filament exceeds the critical value for equilibrium by a small amount, perturbations do not grow much, and the entire filament collapses toward the axis without fragmenting. In this case no characteristic scale for fragmentation appears during the isothermal collapse phase. Subsequent evolution is also investigated. A change of the equation of state yields a characteristic density, separation length, and mass for fragmentation. These values correspond to 5 × 10-15 g cm-3, 2 × 10-3 pc, and 4 × 10-2 M☉, if the cloud temperature is 10 K. These results are consistent with recent high-resolution radio observations of dense cores in Taurus dark cloud.
Related Papers
- → Formation and eruption of a double-decker filament triggered by micro-bursts and recurrent jets in the filament channel(2018)23 cited
- → Formation of a Long Filament Through the Connection of Two Filament Segments Observed by CHASE(2023)9 cited
- → Force‐free and Potential Models of a Filament Channel in Which a Filament Forms(1997)50 cited
- → Different molecular filament widths as tracers of accretion on to filaments(2022)5 cited
- → A large flare-associated filament in september 1989(1997)