Triggering Collapse of the Presolar Dense Cloud Core and Injecting Short-Lived Radioisotopes with a Shock Wave. IV. Effects of Rotational Axis Orientation

TL;DR

This study investigates how the orientation of a cloud's rotational axis relative to an impacting shock wave affects the collapse process and the injection of short-lived radioisotopes, supporting supernova-triggered solar system formation.

Contribution

It demonstrates that changing the rotational axis orientation has minimal impact on collapse and isotope injection, reinforcing the supernova trigger hypothesis for the solar system's radioisotope enrichment.

Findings

Injection efficiencies are 0.04 - 0.1, similar to parallel axis models.

Disk spin axes are randomly aligned, not solely determined by initial cloud rotation.

Minor effect of axis orientation on collapse and isotope injection.

Abstract

Both astronomical observations of the interaction of Type II supernova remnants (SNR) with dense interstellar clouds as well as cosmochemical studies of the abundances of daughter products of short-lived radioisotopes (SLRIs) formed by supernova nucleosynthesis support the hypothesis that the Solar Systems SLRIs may have been derived from a supernova. This paper continues a series devoted to examining whether such a shock wave could have triggered the dynamical collapse of a dense, presolar cloud core and simultaneously injected sufficient abundances of SLRIs to explain the cosmochemical evidence. Here we examine the effects of shock waves striking clouds whose spin axes are oriented perpendicular, rather than parallel, to the direction of propagation of the shock front. The models start with 2.2 solar mass cloud cores and shock speeds of 20 or 40 km/sec. Central protostars and protoplanetary disks form in all models, though with disk spin axes aligned somewhat randomly. The disks derive most of their angular momentum not from the initial cloud rotation, but from the Rayleigh-Taylor fingers that also inject shock wave SLRIs. Injection efficiencies, fi, the fraction of the incident shock wave material injected into the collapsing cloud core, are 0.04 - 0.1 in these models, similar to when the rotation axis is parallel to the shock propagation direction. Evidently altering the rotation axis orientation has only a minor effect on the outcome, strengthening the case for this scenario as an explanation for the Solar Systems SLRIs.