W51North: A protocluster emerging out of a thermally inhibited fragmenting cloud
arXiv:2109.07658 · doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202038741
Abstract
The fragmentation process in massive star-forming regions is one of the contemporary problems in astrophysics, and several physical processes have been proposed to control the fragmentation including turbulence, magnetic field, rotation, stellar feedback, and gravity. However, the fragmentation process has been poorly studied at small spatial scales well below 1000 AU. We aim to use ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter and Submillimeter Array) high angular resolution data to identify the fragments in W51 IRS2 and to study the fragmentation properties on a spatial scale of 200 AU. We used ALMA data of W51 IRS2 from three projects, which give an angular resolution of 0.028 (144 AU) at millimeter wavelengths. We identified compact fragments by using {\it uv}-range constrained 1.3 mm continuum data. A Mean Surface Density of Companions (MSDC) analysis has been performed to study the separations between fragments. A total number of 33 continuum sources are identified and 29 out of them are defined as fragments in the surveyed region.The MSDC analysis reveals two breaks corresponding to spatial sales of 1845 AU and 7346 AU, indicative of a two-level clustering phenomenon, along with a linear regime below 1845 AU, mostly associated with W51 North, whose slope is consistent with the slope for the clustering regime of other cluster-like regions in the Galaxy. The typical masses and separations of the fragments as well as the relation between density and number of fragments can be explained through a thermal Jeans process operating at high temperatures of 200--400 K, consistent with previous measurements of the temperature in the region, and produced by the nearby massive stars. Therefore, although W51 IRS2 seems to be undergoing a thermally inhibited fragmentation phase, this does not seem to prevent the formation of a protocluster associated with W51 North.
References in corpus (13)
- Trigonometric Parallaxes Of High-Mass Star Forming Regions: Our View Of The Milky Way
- Radiation-Hydrodynamic Simulations of Collapse and Fragmentation in Massive Protostellar Cores
- Limiting Accretion onto Massive Stars by Fragmentation-Induced Starvation
- The Fragmentation of Magnetized, Massive Star-Forming Cores with Radiative Feedback
- Chains of dense cores in the Taurus L1495/B213 complex
- Spatial Distributions of Young Stars
- Thermal Feedback in the high-mass star and cluster forming region W51
- Forming an Early O-type Star Through Gas Accretion?
- The JCMT Gould Belt Survey: A First Look at Southern Orion A with SCUBA-2
- Magnetically-regulated fragmentation of a massive, dense and turbulent clump
- HII regions and high-mass starless clump candidates II. Fragmentation and induced star formation at ~0.025 pc scale: An ALMA continuum study
- The role of the magnetic field in the fragmentation process: the case of G14.225-0.506
- A dense micro-cluster of Class 0 protostars in NGC 2264 D-MM1