The effect of stellar winds on the formation of a protocluster

Abstract

We present SPH simulations of protoclusters including the effects of winds from massive stars. Using a particle-injection method, we investigate the effect of structure close to the wind sources and the short-timescale influence of winds on protoclusters. Structures such as disks and gaseous filaments have a strong collimating effect. By a different technique of injecting momentum from point sources, we compare the large-scale, long-term effects of isotropic and intrinsically-collimated winds and find them to be similar. Both types of wind dramatically slow the global star formation process, but the timescale on which they expel significant mass from the cluster is rather long (approaching 10 freefall times). Clusters may then experience rapid star formation early in their lifetimes, before switching to a mode where gas is gradually expelled, while star formation proceeds much more slowly. This complicates conclusions regarding slow star formation derived from measuring the star-formation efficiency per freefall time. Estimates of the efficacy of winds in dispersing clusters derived simply from the total wind momentum flux may not be very reliable. This is due to material being expelled from deep within stellar potential wells, often to velocities well in excess of the cluster escape velocity, and also to the loss of momentum flux through holes in the gas distribution. Winds have little effect on the accretion--driven stellar IMF except at the very high-mass end, where they serve to prevent some of the most massive objects accreting. We also find that the morphology of the gas, the rapid motions of the wind sources and the action of accretion flows prevent the formation of bubble-like structures. This may make it difficult to discern the influence of winds on very young clusters.

14 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS, replaced with revised version as references missing in original

References in corpus (1)

• Slow Star Formation in Dense Gas: Evidence and Implications

Cited by in corpus (19)

• Before the first supernova: combined effects of HII regions and winds on molecular clouds
• Modeling jet and outflow feedback during star cluster formation
• Efficiently Cooled Stellar Wind Bubbles in Turbulent Clouds II. Validation of Theory with Hydrodynamic Simulations
• Core-Halo Age Gradients and Star Formation in the Orion Nebula and NGC~2024 Young Stellar Clusters
• Supernova feedback and the energy deposition in molecular clouds
• The dense gas mass fraction in the W51 cloud and its protoclusters
• How runaway stars boost galactic outflows
• Simulating radiative feedback and star cluster formation in GMCs: II. Mass dependence of cloud destruction and cluster properties
• INFERNO: Galactic winds in dwarf galaxies with star-by-star simulations including runaway stars
• The roles of stellar feedback and galactic environment in star forming molecular clouds
• The Formation of Very Massive Stars
• SEDIGISM-ATLASGAL: Dense Gas Fraction and Star Formation Efficiency Across the Galactic Disk
• Formation of star clusters and enrichment by massive stars in simulations of low-metallicity galaxies with a fully sampled initial stellar mass function
• Primordial mass segregation in simulations of star formation?
• Highly turbulent gas on GMC-scales in NGC 3256, the nearest luminous infrared galaxy
• The Structure of the Young Star Cluster NGC 6231. II. Structure, Formation, and Fate
• Stellar winds and photoionization in a spiral arm
• Assessing the Performance of a Machine Learning Algorithm in Identifying Bubbles in Dust Emission
• The Cloud Factory II: Gravoturbulent Kinematics of Resolved Molecular Clouds in a Galactic Potential