Does feedback help or hinder star formation? The effect of photoionisation on star formation in Giant Molecular Clouds

TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations to explore how photoionising feedback influences star formation in giant molecular clouds, revealing that feedback effects depend heavily on cloud structure and can either promote or suppress star formation.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of feedback effects in idealised and realistic cloud structures, highlighting the importance of gas density and structure in star formation regulation.

Findings

Photoionisation suppresses gas fragmentation in idealised clouds, leading to more massive stars.

Feedback effects switch from positive to negative over time as gas disperses.

In realistic clouds, feedback generally suppresses star formation due to structural complexity.

Abstract

We investigated the effect of photoionising feedback inside turbulent star-forming clouds, comparing the resultant star formation in both idealised profiles and more realistic cloud structures drawn from a global galaxy simulation. We performed a series of numerical simulations which compared the effect of star formation alone, photoionisation and photoionisation plus supernovae feedback. In the idealised cloud, photoionisation suppresses gas fragmentation at early times, resulting in the formation of more massive stars and an increase in the star formation efficiency. At later times, the dispersal of the dense gas causes the radiative feedback effect to switch from positive to negative as the star formation efficiency drops. In the cloud extracted from the global simulation, the initial cloud is heavily fragmented prior to the stellar feedback beginning and is largely structurally unaffected by the late injection of radiation energy. The result is a suppression of the star formation. We conclude that the efficiency of feedback is heavily dependent on the gas structure, with negative feedback dominating when the density is high.