Collapse and Fragmentation of Magnetic Molecular Cloud Cores with the Enzo AMR MHD Code. I. Uniform Density Sphere

TL;DR

This study uses the Enzo AMR MHD code to simulate the collapse of magnetic molecular cloud cores, revealing how magnetic field strength and orientation influence whether the cloud forms a single star, multiple stars, or remains stable.

Contribution

It provides new 3D MHD simulation results showing the impact of magnetic fields on cloud collapse and fragmentation, expanding understanding beyond previous non-magnetic models.

Findings

Magnetic field strength and direction critically affect collapse outcomes.

Identified three main collapse outcomes: no collapse, single protostar, multiple protostars.

Compared results with previous barotropic MHD models.

Abstract

Magnetic fields are important contributers to the dynamics of collapsing molecular cloud cores, and can have a major effect on whether collapse results in a single protostar or fragmentation into a binary or multiple protostar system. New models are presented of the collapse of magnetic cloud cores using the adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code Enzo2.0. The code was used to calculate the ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) of initially spherical, uniform density and rotation clouds with density perturbations, i.e., the Boss and Bodenheimer (1979) standard isothermal test case for three dimensional (3D) hydrodynamics (HD) codes. After first verifying that Enzo reproduces the binary fragmentation expected for the non-magnetic test case, a large set of models was computed with varied initial magnetic field strengths and directions with respect to the cloud core axis of rotation (parallel or perpendicular), density perturbation amplitudes, and equations of state. Three significantly different outcomes resulted: (1) contraction without sustained collapse, forming a denser cloud core, (2) collapse to form a single protostar with significant spiral arms, and (3) collapse and fragmentation into binary or multiple protostar systems, with multiple spiral arms. Comparisons are also made with previous MHD calculations of similar clouds with barotropic equations of state. These results for the collapse of initially uniform density spheres illustrate the central importance of both magnetic field direction and field strength for determining the outcome of dynamic protostellar collapse.