Published in

Oxford University Press, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 4(505), p. 5183-5191, 2021

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stab1509

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Convergent filaments contracting towards an intermediate-mass pre-stellar core

This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

Full text: Unavailable

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

ABSTRACT Filamentary structures are closely associated with star-forming cores, but their detailed physical connections are still not clear. We studied the dense gas in OMC-3 MMS-7 region in the Orion A molecular cloud using the molecular lines observed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Submillimeter Array (SMA). The ALMA N2H+ (1–0) emission has revealed three dense filaments intersected at the centre, coincident with the central core MMS-7, which has a mass of 3.6 M⊙. The filaments and cores are embedded in a parental clump with a total mass of 29 M⊙. The N2H+ velocity field exhibits a noticeable increasing trend along the filaments towards the central core MMS-7 with a scale of v − vlsr ≃ 1.5 km s−1 over a spatial range of ∼20 arcsec (8 × 103 au), corresponding to a gradient of $40\, {\rm km\, s^{-1}}\, {\rm pc}^{-1}$. This feature is most likely to indicate an infall motion towards the centre. The derived infall rate (8 × 10−5 M⊙ yr−1) and time-scale (3.6 × 105 yr) are much lower than that for a spherical free-fall collapse and more consistent with the contraction of the filament structures. The filaments also exhibit a possible fragmentation. But this does not seem to largely interrupt the gas structure or its contraction towards the centre. Thus, MMS-7 provides an example of filamentary inward motion directly towards a pre-stellar core. The filament contraction could be less intense but more steady than global spherical collapse, and may help generate an intermediate-mass or even high-mass star.