Dust cleansing of star-forming gas I: Did radiation from bright stars affect the chemical composition of the Sun and of M67?

TL;DR

This study investigates whether radiation from bright stars could have altered the chemical composition of the Sun and M67 by dust cleansing, concluding that such effects are limited to small regions and unlikely to impact entire clusters.

Contribution

The paper introduces semi-analytical estimates of dust-cleansing effects from stellar radiation, highlighting limitations in mass and scale for significant chemical alterations.

Findings

Dust-cleansing effects are confined to thin shells around HII regions.

The mechanism is unlikely to significantly affect large stellar clusters like M67.

Cleansing effects could influence individual stars or small groups, not entire clusters.

Abstract

The possibility that the solar chemical composition, as well as the similar composition of the rich open cluster M67, have been affected by dust cleansing of the pre-solar/pre-cluster cloud, due to the radiative forces from bright early-type stars in its neighbourhood, is explored. Estimates, using semi-analytical methods and essentially based on momentum conservation, are made of possible dust-cleansing effects. Our calculations indicate that the amounts of cleansed neutral gas are limited to a relatively thin shell surrounding the HII region around the early-type stars. It seems possible that the proposed mechanism acting in individual giant molecular clouds may produce significant abundance effects for masses corresponding to single stars or small groups of stars. The effects of cleansing are, however, severely constrained by the thinness of the cleansed shell of gas and by turbulence in the cloud, why the mechanism can hardly be important in cleansing masses corresponding to rich clusters, such as the mass of the original M67.