Radiative Cooling Flows of Self-Gravitating Filamentary Clouds

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a self-gravitating cooling filamentary cloud using a simplified model. We concentrate on the radial distribution and restrict ourselves to quasi-hydrostatic, cylindrically symmetric cooling flows. For a power-law dependence of cooling function on the temperature, self-similar solutions which describe quasi-hydrostatic cooling flows are derived. We consider obtically thin filaments with a constant mass per unit length and the solutions are parameterized by their line masses. There is no polytropic relation between the density and the pressure. The filament experiences radiative condensation, irrespective of the γ, the gas specific heat ratio. So, the filament becomes denser due to the quasi-hydrostatic flows and the density at the center increases in proportion to (t_{0}-t)^{-1}, where t denotes the time. The term, t_{0}, denotes an epoch at which the central density increases infinitely. We also found that the radius of the filament decreases in proportion to (t_{0}-t)^{0.5}.