Triggering Collapse of the Presolar Dense Cloud Core and Injecting Short-Lived Radioisotopes with a Shock Wave. I. Varied Shock Speeds

TL;DR

This study models how shock waves of varying speeds can trigger collapse and inject short-lived radioisotopes into presolar cloud cores, supporting the supernova hypothesis for solar system formation.

Contribution

It extends previous models by analyzing a wider range of shock speeds and demonstrates conditions under which collapse and isotope injection occur.

Findings

Shock speeds of 5-70 km/sec can trigger collapse and injection.

Lower speeds fail to inject, higher speeds fail to sustain collapse.

Models support supernova shock wave role in solar system formation.

Abstract

The discovery of decay products of a short-lived radioisotope (SLRI) in the Allende meteorite led to the hypothesis that a supernova shock wave transported freshly synthesized SLRI to the presolar dense cloud core, triggered its self-gravitational collapse, and injected the SLRI into the core. Previous multidimensional numerical calculations of the shock-cloud collision process showed that this hypothesis is plausible when the shock wave and dense cloud core are assumed to remain isothermal at ~10 K, but not when compressional heating to ~1000 K is assumed. Our two-dimensional models (Boss et al. 2008) with the FLASH2.5 adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) hydrodynamics code have shown that a 20 km/sec shock front can simultaneously trigger collapse of a 1 solar mass core and inject shock wave material, provided that cooling by molecular species such as H2O, CO, and H2 is included. Here we present the results for similar calculations with shock speeds ranging from 1 km/sec to 100 km/sec. We find that shock speeds in the range from 5 km/sec to 70 km/sec are able to trigger the collapse of a 2.2 solar mass cloud while simultaneously injecting shock wave material: lower speed shocks do not achieve injection, while higher speed shocks do not trigger sustained collapse. The calculations continue to support the shock-wave trigger hypothesis for the formation of the solar system, though the injection efficiencies in the present models are lower than desired.