Stars at the Tip of Peculiar Elephant Trunk-Like Clouds in IC 1848E: A Possible Third Mechanism of Triggered Star Formation

TL;DR

This paper investigates unique elephant trunk-like structures in IC 1848E, suggesting they are a new type of triggered star formation mechanism caused by hydrodynamical instabilities, distinct from known processes.

Contribution

It proposes a third mechanism of triggered star formation involving hydrodynamical instability of ionization fronts, supported by photometric and morphological analysis of associated young stars.

Findings

Stars at the tips are young, low-mass pre-main-sequence stars.

Elephant trunk-like clouds are morphologically distinct from BRCs.

These structures likely result from hydrodynamical instabilities in HII regions.

Abstract

The HII region IC 1848 harbors a lot of intricate elephant trunk-like structures that look morphologically different from usual bright-rimmed clouds (BRCs). Of particular interest is a concentration of thin and long elephant trunk-like structures in the southeastern part of IC 1848E. Some of them have an apparently associated star (or two stars) at their very tip. We conducted $VI_{c}$ photometry of several of these stars. Their positions on the $V/(V-I_{c})$ color-magnitude diagram as well as the physical parameters obtained by SED fittings indicate that they are low-mass pre-main-sequence stars having ages of mostly one Myr or less. This strongly suggests that they formed from elongated, elephant trunk-like clouds. We presume that such elephant trunk-like structures are genetically different from BRCs, on the basis of the differences in morphology, size distributions, and the ages of the associated young stars. We suspect that those clouds have been caused by hydrodynamical instability of the ionization/shock front of the expanding HII region. Similar structures often show up in recent numerical simulations of the evolution of HII regions. We further hypothesize that this mechanism makes a third mode of triggered star formation associated with HII regions, in addition to the two known mechanisms, i.e., collect-and-collapse of the shell accumulated around an expanding HII region and radiation-driven implosion of BRCs originated from pre-existing cloud clumps.