Stellar Kinematics of Young Clusters in Turbulent Hydrodynamic Simulations

TL;DR

This study uses turbulent hydrodynamic simulations to analyze the kinematics of young star clusters, revealing that they naturally exhibit subvirial velocity dispersions and large-scale velocity gradients regardless of the parent cloud's dynamical state.

Contribution

It demonstrates through simulations that young star clusters display characteristic kinematic features independent of the virial state of their parent molecular clouds.

Findings

Stars have velocity dispersions about 1/5 of the gas, regardless of cloud virialization.

Clusters show large-scale velocity gradients of 0.2-2 km/s/pc.

Strong correlations between star and gas velocities are observed.

Abstract

The kinematics of newly-formed star clusters are interesting both as a probe of the state of the gas clouds from which the stars form, and because they influence planet formation, stellar mass segregation, cluster disruption, and other processes controlled in part by dynamical interactions in young clusters. However, to date there have been no attempts to use simulations of star cluster formation to investigate how the kinematics of young stars change in response to variations in the properties of their parent molecular clouds. In this letter we report the results of turbulent self-gravitating simulations of cluster formation in which we consider both clouds in virial balance and those undergoing global collapse. We find that stars in these simulations generally have velocity dispersions smaller than that of the gas by a factor of ~ 5, independent of the dynamical state of the parent cloud, so that subvirial stellar velocity dispersions arise naturally even in virialized molecular clouds. The simulated clusters also show large-scale stellar velocity gradients of ~0.2-2 km s$^{-1}$ pc$^{-1}$ and strong correlations between the centroid velocities of stars and gas, both of which are observed in young clusters. We conclude that star clusters should display subvirial velocity dispersions, large-scale velocity gradients, and strong gas-star velocity correlations regardless of whether their parent clouds are in virial balance, and, conversely, that observations of these features cannot be used to infer the dynamical state of the parent gas clouds.