Hierarchical Structure of YSO Clusters in the W40 and Serpens South Region: Group Extraction and Comparison with Fractal Clusters

TL;DR

This study investigates the hierarchical spatial distribution of young stellar objects in the W40 and Serpens South regions, revealing that their structures resemble fractal patterns inherited from their natal molecular clouds, with variations between core and periphery regions.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new MST-based method for analyzing hierarchical structures of YSOs and compares observed data with synthetic fractal distributions to characterize their spatial patterns.

Findings

YSO spatial distribution matches multi-fractal patterns.

Core regions have lower fractal dimensions (~1.4-1.6) compared to diffuse peripheries (~2.0).

Hierarchical structures dissipate over several million years.

Abstract

Young stellar clusters are believed to inherit the spatial distribution like hierarchical structures of their natal molecular cloud during their formation. However, the change of the structures between the cloud and the young clusters is not well constrained observationally. We select the W40 - Serpens South region (~ 7 $\times$ 9 pc$^{2}$) of the Aquila Rift as a testbed and investigate hierarchical properties of spatial distribution of young stellar objects (YSOs) in this region. We develop a minimum spanning tree (MST)-based method to group stars into several levels by successively cutting down edges longer than an algorithmically determined critical value. A total of 832 YSOs are divided into 5 levels with 23 groups. For describing the hierarchical properties in a controlled way, we construct a set of synthetic source distributions at various fractal dimensions, and apply the same method to explore their group characters. By comparing the $Q$ parameter and the surface density profiles of the observed and the synthetic data, we find that the YSO observation matches spatial patterns from multi-fractal dimensions. In the periphery region where the molecular clouds are more diffuse, the YSO structure is close to a fractal dimension of 2.0, while in the core regions the fractal dimensions are close to 1.6 and 1.4 for the W40 and the Serpens South regions, respectively. Therefore, the YSOs may inherit the fractal pattern of the dense part of the molecular clouds, but such pattern dissipates slowly in several Myr.