Stirring up an embedded star cluster with a moving gas filament

TL;DR

This study uses simulations to explore how moving gas filaments influence young star clusters, revealing four distinct evolutionary outcomes and providing insights into cluster dynamics in filamentary environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation approach to analyze the effects of sinusoidal moving gas filaments on star cluster evolution, classifying resulting cluster states.

Findings

Static filaments cause clusters to elongate naturally.

Moving filaments lead to four distinct cluster outcomes.

Orion-like clusters are resilient to destruction.

Abstract

We perform simulations to test the effects of a moving gas filament on a young star cluster (i.e. the "Slingshot" Model). We model Orion Nebula Cluster-like clusters as Plummer spheres and the Integral Shaped Filament gas as a cylindrical potential. We observe that in a static filament, an initially spherical cluster evolves naturally into an elongated distribution of stars. For sinusoidal moving filaments, we observe different remnants, and classify them into 4 categories.%: 3 different objects and one transition object. "Healthy" clusters, where almost all the stars stay inside the filament and the cluster; "destroyed" clusters are the opposite case, with almost no particles in the filament or near the centre of density of the clusters; "ejected" clusters, where a large fraction of stars are close to the centre of density of the stars , but almost none of them in the filament; and "transition" clusters, where roughly the same number of particles is ejected from the cluster and from the filament. An {{Orion Nebula Cluster-like}} cluster might stay inside the filament or be ejected, but it will not be destroyed.