Importance of the Initial Conditions for Star Formation - II. Fragmentation Induced Starvation and Accretion Shielding

TL;DR

This study uses 3D simulations to show that regardless of initial conditions, protostellar clusters experience a common pattern of gas accretion suppression near the center, called fragmentation induced starvation.

Contribution

It reveals that fragmentation induced starvation is a universal process occurring in various cluster morphologies, regardless of initial density or turbulence conditions.

Findings

Central accretion rates decrease after secondary protostar formation

Fragmentation induced starvation occurs in diverse cluster structures

Gas distribution and morphology vary widely despite similar accretion behavior

Abstract

We investigate the impact of different initial conditions for the initial density profile and the initial turbulence on the formation process of protostellar clusters. We study the collapse of dense molecula r cloud cores with three-dimensional adaptive mesh refinement simulations. We focus our discussion on the distribution of the gas among the protostellar objects in the turbulent dynamical cores. Despite the large variations in the initial configurations and the resulting gas and cluster morphology we find that all stellar clusters follow a very similar gas accretion behaviour. Once secondary protostars begin to form, the central region of a cluster is efficiently shielded from further accretion. Hence, objects located close to the centre are starved of material, as indicated by a strong decrease of the central acc retion rate. This Fragmentation Induced Starvation occurs not only in rotationally supported discs and filaments, but also in more spherically symmetric clusters with complex chaotic motions.