Implementation of stellar heating feedback in simulations of star cluster formation: effects on the initial mass function

Abstract

Explaining the initial mass function (IMF) of stars is a long-standing problem in astrophysics. The number of complex mechanisms involved in the process of star cluster formation, such as turbulence, magnetic fields and stellar feedback, make understanding and modeling the IMF a challenging task. In this paper, we aim to assert the importance of stellar heating feedback in the star cluster formation process and its effect on the shape of the IMF. We use an analytical sub-grid model to implement the radiative feedback in fully three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) simulations of star cluster formation, with the ultimate objective of obtaining numerical convergence on the IMF. We compare a set of MHD adaptive-mesh-refinement (AMR) simulations with three different implementations of the heating of the gas: 1) a polytropic equation of state (EOS), 2) a spherically symmetric stellar heating feedback, and 3) our newly developed polar heating model that takes into account the geometry of the accretion disc and the resulting shielding of stellar radiation by dust. For each of the three heating models, we analyse the distribution of stellar masses formed in ten molecular cloud simulations with different realizations of the turbulence to obtain a statistically representative IMF. We conclude that stellar heating feedback has a profound influence on the number of stars formed and plays a crucial role in controlling the IMF. We find that the simulations with the polar heating model achieve the best convergence on the observed IMF.

10 pages, 5 figures, 1 table; added references, published in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• The IMF and multiplicity of stars from gravity, turbulence, magnetic fields, radiation and outflow feedback
• The density structure of supersonic self-gravitating turbulence
• The Velocity Statistics of Turbulent Clouds in the Presence of Gravity, Magnetic fields, Radiation, and Outflow Feedback
• The role of the turbulence driving mode for the Initial Mass Function
• Testing the Turbulent Origin of the Stellar Initial Mass Function
• The statistical properties of protostellar discs and their dependence on metallicity
• Wide-binary eccentricity distribution in young star clusters: dependence on the binary separation and mass
• Protostellar disc structure and dynamics during star formation from cloud-scale initial conditions
• When did the initial mass function become bottom-heavy?