Gravitational instability of filamentary molecular clouds, including ambipolar diffusion

Abstract

The gravitational instability of a filamentary molecular cloud in non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics is investigated. The filament is assumed to be in hydrostatic equilibrium. We add the effect of ambipolar diffusion to the filament which is threaded by an initial uniform axial magnetic field along its axis. We write down the fluid equations in cylindrical coordinates and perform linear perturbation analysis. We integrate the resultant differential equations and then derive the numerical dispersion relation. We find that, a more efficient ambipolar diffusion leads to an enhancement of the growth of the most unstable mode, and to increase of the fragmentation scale of the filament.

Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 10 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Theory of Star Formation
• Cold Dark Clouds: The Initial Conditions for Star Formation
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Magnetized interstellar molecular clouds: II. The Large-Scale Structure and Dynamics of Filamentary Molecular Clouds
• The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in the Orion nebula: The effect of radiation pressure
• An MHD spectral theory approach to Jeans' magnetized gravitational instability