Radiation Feedback, Fragmentation, and the Environmental Dependence of the Initial Mass Function

TL;DR

This study uses radiation-hydrodynamic simulations to explore how cloud surface density influences star formation and fragmentation, revealing that higher densities suppress fragmentation and favor massive star formation, impacting the initial mass function.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates how cloud surface density affects radiative feedback and fragmentation, providing new insights into the environmental dependence of the initial mass function.

Findings

Radiation feedback suppresses fragmentation more at higher surface densities.

Higher surface densities lead to fewer small clusters and more massive stars.

Fragmentation is less significant in dense, massive star-forming regions.

Abstract

The fragmentation of star-forming interstellar clouds, and the resulting stellar initial mass function (IMF), is strongly affected by the temperature structure of the collapsing gas. Since radiation feedback from embedded stars can modify this as collapse proceeds, feedback plays an important role in determining the IMF. However, the effects and importance of radiative heating are likely to depend strongly on the surface density of the collapsing clouds, which determines both their effectiveness at trapping radiation and the accretion luminosities of the stars forming within them. In this paper we report a suite of adaptive mesh refinement radiation-hydrodynamic simulations using the ORION code in which we isolate the effect of column density on fragmentation by following the collapse of clouds of varying column density while holding the mass, initial density and velocity structure, and initial virial ratio fixed. We find that radiation does not significantly modify the overall star formation rate or efficiency, but that it suppresses fragmentation more and more as cloud surface densities increase from those typical of low mass star-forming regions like Taurus, through the typical surface density of massive star-forming clouds in the Galaxy, up to conditions found only in super star clusters. In regions of low surface density, fragmentation during collapse leads to the formation of small clusters rather than individual massive star systems, greatly reducing the fraction of the stellar population with masses >~ 10 Msun. Our simulations have important implications for the formation of massive stars and the universality of the IMF.