The effect of tidal forces on the Jeans instability criterion in star-forming regions

TL;DR

This paper extends the Jeans instability analysis by incorporating external tidal forces, revealing how tides influence star-forming fragment collapse and providing practical equations for observational assessment.

Contribution

It introduces a formalism to include external gravitational potentials in Jeans analysis, offering new collapse criteria and observational tools for star formation studies.

Findings

External tides can either promote or hinder collapse depending on their nature.

Approximately 49% of observed fragments may be gravitationally unstable considering tides.

Tidal effects suggest fragments formed earlier in flatter core environments.

Abstract

Recent works have proposed the idea of a tidal screening scenario, in which tidal forces determine the mass that a protostar can accrete to explain the IMF. In this scenario, gravitationally unstable fragments will compete for the gas reservoir in a star-forming clump. In this contribution, we propose to properly include the action of an external gravitational potential in the Jeans linear instability analysis as previously proposed by Jog. We have found that an external gravitational potential can reduce the critical mass required for the perturbation to collapse if the tidal force produced is compressive or increase it if it is disruptive. Our analytical treatment provides (a) new mass and length collapse conditions; (b) a simple equation for observers to check whether their observed fragments can collapse; and (c) a simple equation to compute whether collapse-induced turbulence can produce the levels of observed fragmentation. Our results suggest that, given envelopes with similar mass and density, the flatter ones should produce more stars than the steeper ones. If the density profile is a power-law, the corresponding power-law index separating these two regimes should be about 1.5. We finally applied our formalism to 160 fragments identified within 18 massive star-forming cores of previous works. We found that considering tides, 49% of the sample may be gravitationally unstable and that it is unlikely that turbulence acting at the moment of collapse has produced the fragmentation of these cores. Instead, these fragments should have formed earlier when the parent core was substantially flatter.