The formation of filamentary structures in radiative cluster winds

TL;DR

This paper investigates how radiative interactions of stellar winds in young star clusters create filamentary and knotty structures, using 3D simulations that match some observed features.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed 3D radiative simulations of cluster winds, revealing the formation of filamentary structures due to wind-ISM interactions.

Findings

Winds from young stars are likely radiative in typical cluster conditions.

Simulations produce dense knots and filaments resembling observed structures.

Wind parameters and ISM density significantly influence the resulting morphology.

Abstract

We explore the dynamics of a ``cluster wind'' flow in the regime in which the shocks resulting from the interaction of winds from nearby stars are radiative. We first show that for a cluster with T Tauri stars and/or Herbig Ae/Be stars, the wind interactions are indeed likely to be radiative. We then compute a set of four, three dimensional, radiative simulations of a cluster of 75 young stars, exploring the effects of varying the wind parameters and the density of the initial ISM that permeates the volume of the cluster. These simulations show that the ISM is compressed by the action of the winds into a structure of dense knots and filaments. The structures that are produced resemble in a qualitative way the observations of the IRAS 18511+0146 of Vig et al. (2007).