Star formation in molecular cores III. The effect of the turbulent power spectrum

Abstract

We investigate the effect of the turbulent power spectrum (P(k) \propto k^{-n}, with n=3, 4 or 5) on the fragmentation of low-mass cores, by means of SPH simulations. We adopt initial density profiles and low levels of turbulence based on observation, and for each n-value we conduct an ensemble of simulations with different initial seeds for the turbulent velocity field, so as to obtain reasonable statistics. We find that when power is concentrated at larger scales (i.e. for larger n), more protostellar objects form and there is a higher proportion of low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. This is in direct contrast with the recent results of Delgado Donate et al., presumably because they adopted much higher levels of turbulence.