Decaying turbulence in molecular clouds: how does it affect filament networks and star formation?

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution simulations to explore how different turbulent modes and virial ratios influence the structure and star formation processes in molecular clouds, revealing the importance of initial conditions and filament networks.

Contribution

It introduces a new suite of 15 detailed simulations and a novel Python toolkit, FIESTA, to analyze filament networks and their role in star formation in molecular clouds.

Findings

Diffuse regions retain initial turbulence signatures.

Overbound clouds produce more filaments and mass in filaments.

Star formation occurs preferentially at filament hubs.

Abstract

The fragmentation of gas to form stars in molecular clouds is intrinsically linked to the turbulence within them. These internal motions are set at the birth of the cloud and may vary with galactic environment and as the cloud evolves. In this paper, we introduce a new suite of 15 high-resolution 3D molecular cloud simulations using the moving mesh code AREPO to investigate the role of different decaying turbulent modes (mixed, compressive and solenoidal) and virial ratios on the evolution of a $10^4\mathrm{M}_{\odot}$ molecular cloud. We find that diffuse regions maintain a strong relic of the initial turbulent mode, whereas the initial gravitational potential dominates dense regions. Solenoidal seeded models thus give rise to a diffuse cloud with filament-like morphology, and an excess of brown dwarf mass fragments. Compressive seeded models have an early onset of star-formation, centrally condensed morphologies and a higher accretion rate, along with overbound clouds. 3D filaments identified using DisPerSE and analyzed through a new Python toolkit we develop and make publicly available with this work called FIESTA, show no clear trend in lengths, masses and densities between initial turbulent modes. Overbound clouds, however, produce more filaments and thus have more mass in filaments. The hubs formed by converging filaments are found to favour star-formation, with surprisingly similar mass distributions independent of the number of filaments connecting the hub.