Gas and star kinematics in cloud-cloud collisions
Abstract
We model the collision of molecular clouds to investigate the role of the initial properties on the remnants. Our clouds collide and evolve in a background medium that is approximately ten times less dense than the clouds, and we show that this relatively dense background is dynamically important for the evolution of the collision remnants. Given the motion of the clouds and the remnants through the background, we develop, implement, and introduce dynamic boundary conditions. We investigate the effect of the initial cloud mass, velocity, internal turbulence, and impact angle. The initial velocity and its velocity components have the largest affect on the remnant. This affects the spatial extent of the remnant, which affects the number of resulting star clusters and the distribution of their masses. The less extended remnants tend to have fewer, but more massive, clusters. Unlike the clusters, the gas distributions are relatively insensitive to the initial conditions, both the distribution of the bulk gas properties and the gas clumps. In general, cloud collisions are relatively insensitive to their initial conditions when modelled hydrodynamically in a dynamically important background medium.
Citation
Wurster , J & Bonnell , I A 2023 , ' Gas and star kinematics in cloud-cloud collisions ' , Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , vol. 522 , no. 1 , stad1022 , pp. 891-911 . https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad1022
Publication
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0035-8711Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). This work has been made available online in accordance with the Rights Retention Strategy. This accepted manuscript is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad1022.
Description
Funding: JW and IAB acknowledge support from the University of St Andrews. The equipment was funded by BEIS capital funding via STFC capital grants ST/K000373/1 and ST/R002363/1 and STFC DiRAC Operations grant ST/R001014/1.Collections
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