Radiation Driven Implosion and Triggered Star Formation

TL;DR

This paper uses simulations to explore how ionizing radiation influences the stability and star formation in clouds, revealing that flux intensity determines whether clouds disperse or form stars.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation framework combining SPH and photoionization algorithms to study radiation-driven implosion and star formation conditions.

Findings

High ionizing flux disperses clouds.

Low flux triggers star formation.

Flux intensity correlates with star formation parameters.

Abstract

We present simulations of initially stable isothermal clouds exposed to ionizing radiation from a discrete external source, and identify the conditions that lead to radiatively driven implosion and star formation. We use the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics code SEREN (Hubber et al. 2010) and the HEALPix-based photoionization algorithm described in Bisbas et al. (2009). We find that the incident ionizing flux is the critical parameter determining the evolution: high fluxes simply disperse the cloud, whereas low fluxes trigger star formation. We find a clear connection between the intensity of the incident flux and the parameters of star formation.