The photoevaporation of a neutral structure by an EUV+FUV radiation field

TL;DR

This study uses 3D simulations to explore how EUV and FUV radiation from young stars influence the fragmentation and star formation potential of their parental molecular clouds, highlighting the FUV field's role in early dense clump formation.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed 3D modeling approach that incorporates both EUV and FUV radiation effects on molecular cloud fragmentation, emphasizing the impact of FUV on early dense structure formation.

Findings

FUV radiation accelerates dense clump formation.

Including FUV results in more numerous dense structures.

Outer photodissociation regions significantly influence cloud fragmentation.

Abstract

The EUV photoionizing radiation and FUV dissociating radiation from newly born stars photoevaporate their parental neutral cloud, leading to the formation of dense clumps that could eventually form additional stars. We study the effects of including a photodissociating FUV flux in models of the fragmentation of a photoevaporating, self-gravitating molecular cloud. We compute 3D simulations of the interaction of an inhomogeneous, neutral, self-gravitating cloud with external EUV and FUV radiation fields, and calculate the number of collapsing clumps and their mass. We find that the presence of an outer photodissociation region has an important effect on the formation of dense structures due to the expansion of an HII region. In particular, including a FUV field leads to the earlier formation of a larger number of dense clumps, which might lead to the formation of more stars.