Shell instability of a collapsing dense core

Abstract

Understanding the formation of binary and multiple stellar systems largely comes down to studying the circumstances for the fragmentation of a condensing core during the first stages of the collapse. However, the probability of fragmentation and the number of fragments seem to be determined to a large degree by the initial conditions. In this work we study the fate of the linear perturbations of a homogeneous gas sphere both analytically and numerically. In particular, we investigate the stability of the well-known homologous solution that describes the collapse of a uniform spherical cloud. The difficulty of the mathematical singularity in the perturbation equations is surpassed here by explicitly introducing a weak shock next to the sonic point. In parallel, we perform adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) numerical simulations of the linear stages of the collapse and compared the growth rates obtained by each method. With this combination of analytical and numerical tools, we explore the behavior of both spherically symmetric and non-axisymmetric perturbations. The numerical experiments provide the linear growth rates as a function of the core's initial virial parameter and as a function of the azimuthal wave number of the perturbation. The overlapping regime of the numerical experiments and the analytical predictions is the situation of a cold and large cloud, and in this regime the analytically calculated growth rates agree very well with the ones obtained from the simulations. The use of a weak shock as part of the perturbation allows us to find a physically acceptable solution to the equations for a continuous range of growth rates. The numerical simulations agree very well with the analytical prediction for the most unstable cores, while they impose a limit of a virial parameter of 0.1 for core fragmentation in the absence of rotation.

Accepted by A&A

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• Star Formation in a Turbulent Framework: From Giant Molecular Clouds to Protostars
• The effect of tidal forces on the Jeans instability criterion in star-forming regions
• Why most molecular clouds are gravitationally dominated
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