First Investigation of the Combined Impact of Ionizing Radiation and Momentum Winds from a Massive Star on a Self-Gravitating Core

TL;DR

This study investigates how ionizing radiation and stellar winds from a massive star influence a self-gravitating core, revealing that UV radiation dominates feedback effects while winds cause modest local gas redistribution.

Contribution

Introduces a new HEALPix-based wind scheme in SPH simulations to analyze combined stellar feedback effects on dense gas structures.

Findings

UV radiation is the primary feedback mechanism shaping cold gas.

Wind effects are modest and mainly affect low to intermediate density gas.

Winds contribute to localized gas redistribution and microphysics differences.

Abstract

Massive stars shape the surrounding ISM by emitting ionizing photons and ejecting material through stellar winds. To study the impact of the momentum from the wind of a massive star on the surrounding neutral or ionized material, we implemented a new HEALPix-based momentum conserving wind scheme in the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) code SEREN. A qualitative study of the impact of the feedback from an O7.5-like star on a self gravitating sphere shows that, on its own, the transfer of momentum from a wind onto cold surrounding gas has both a compressing and dispersing effect. It mostly affects gas at low and intermediate densities. When combined with a stellar source's ionizing UV radiation, we find the momentum driven wind to have little direct effect on the gas. We conclude that, during a massive star's main sequence, the UV ionizing radiation is the main feedback mechanism shaping and compressing the cold gas. Overall, the wind's effects on the dense gas dynamics and on the triggering of star formation are very modest. The structures formed in the ionization-only simulation and in the combined feedback simulation are remarkably similar. However, in the combined feedback case, different SPH particles end up being compressed. This indicates that the microphysics of gas mixing differ between the two feedback simulations and that the winds can contribute to the localized redistribution and reshuffling of gas.