The roles of stellar feedback and galactic environment in star-forming molecular clouds

Rey-Raposo, Ramon; Dobbs, Clare; Agertz, Oscar und Alig, Christian (2017): The roles of stellar feedback and galactic environment in star-forming molecular clouds. In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Bd. 464, Nr. 3: S. 3536-3551

Abstract

Feedback from massive stars is thought to play an important role in the evolution of molecular clouds. In this work, we analyse the effects of stellar winds and supernovae (SNe) in the evolution of two massive (similar to 10(6) M-circle dot) giant molecular clouds: one gravitationally bound collapsing cloud and one unbound cloud undergoing disruption by galactic shear. These two clouds have been extracted from a large-scale galaxy model and are re-simulated at a spatial resolution of similar to 0.01 pc, including feedback from winds, SNe, and the combined effect of both. We find that stellar winds stop accretion of gas on to sink particles, and can also trigger star formation in the shells formed by the winds, although the overall effect is to reduce the global star formation rate of both clouds. Furthermore, we observe that winds tend to escape through the corridors of diffuse gas. The effect of SNe is not so prominent and the star formation rate is similar to models neglecting stellar feedback. We find that most of the energy injected by the SNe is radiated away, but overdense areas are created by multiple and concurrent SN events especially in the most virialized cloud. Our results suggest that the impact of stellar feedback is sensitive to the morphology of star-forming clouds, which is set by large-scale galactic flows, being of greater importance in clouds undergoing gravitational collapse.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Physik
• Themengebiete: 500 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik > 530 Physik
• ISSN: 0035-8711
• Sprache: Englisch