The alignment is in their stars: on the spin-alignment of stars in star clusters

TL;DR

This study uses simulations of star formation in different galactic environments to show that stars tend to have aligned spins within clusters, with environment influencing the degree and persistence of this alignment.

Contribution

It demonstrates that star spins are initially aligned and that this alignment is influenced by environmental factors like galactic shear and gas accretion.

Findings

Stars in clusters have aligned spin vectors at birth.

Gas accretion enhances spin alignment over time.

Environmental effects influence the persistence of spin alignment.

Abstract

We simulate star formation in two molecular clouds extracted from a larger disc-galaxy simulation with a spatial resolution of ~0.1 pc, one exiting a spiral arm dominated by compression, and another in an inter-arm region more strongly affected by galactic shear. Treating the stars as 'sink particles', we track their birth angular momentum, and the later evolution of their angular momentum due to gas accretion. We find that in both clouds, the sinks have spin vectors that are aligned with one another, and with the global angular momentum vector of the star cluster. This alignment is present at birth, but enhanced by later gas accretion. In the compressive cloud, the sink-spins remain aligned with the gas for at least a free fall time. By contrast, in the shear cloud, the increased turbulent mixing causes the sinks to rapidly misalign with their birth cloud on approximately a gas free-fall time. In spite of this, both clouds show a strong alignment of sink-spins at the end of our simulations, independently of environment.