Colliding Filaments and a Massive Dense Core in the Cygnus OB 7 Molecular Cloud

TL;DR

This study investigates a massive dense core in the Cygnus OB 7 cloud, revealing colliding filaments and potential star formation triggered by external shocks, through molecular observations and numerical simulations.

Contribution

It combines molecular line observations with AMR simulations to explore filament collisions and external compression effects in a massive starless core.

Findings

Filaments are massive and collide, possibly influencing star formation.

Filament collisions are driven by external compression, such as supernova shocks.

Simulations show filament formation but not collisions without initial velocity gradients.

Abstract

We report results of molecular line observations carried out toward a massive dense core in the Cyg OB 7 molecular cloud. The core has an extraordinarily large mass ($\sim1.1 \times 10^4$ $M_\odot$) and size ($\sim2 \times 5$ pc$^2$), but there is no massive young star forming therein. We observed this core in various molecular lines such as C$^{18}$O($J=1-0$) using the 45m telescope at Nobeyama Radio Observatory. We find that the core has an elongated morphology consisting of several filaments and core-like structures. The filaments are massive ($10^2-10^3$ $M_\odot$), and they are apparently colliding against each other. Some candidates of YSOs are distributed around their intersection, suggesting that the collisions of the filaments may have influenced on their formation. To understand the formation and evolution of such colliding filaments, we performed numerical simulations using the adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technique adopting the observed core parameters (e.g., the mass and size) as the initial conditions. Results indicate that the filaments are formed as seen in other earlier simulations for small cores in literature, but we could not reproduce the collisions of the filaments simply by assuming the large initial mass and size. We find that the collisions of the filaments occur only when there is a large velocity gradient in the initial core in a sense to compress it. We suggest that the observed core was actually compressed by an external effect, e.g., shocks of nearby supernova remnants including HB21 which has been suggested to be interacting with the Cyg OB 7 molecular cloud.