Radiation Feedback and Fragmentation in Massive Protostellar Cores

Abstract

Star formation generally proceeds inside-out, with overdense regions inside protostellar cores collapsing rapidly and progressively less dense regions following later. Consequently, a small protostar will form early in the evolution of a core, and collapsing material will fall to the protostellar surface and radiate away its gravitational potential energy. The resulting accretion luminosity will heat the core and may substantially affect the process of fragmentation. This is of particular interest for massive cores that, at their initial temperatures, have masses much greater than a thermal Jeans mass and thus might be expected to fragment into many stars during collapse. Here I show that accretion luminosity can heat the inner parts of a core to >100 K very early in the star formation process, and that this in turn strongly suppresses fragmentation. This has implications for a number of outstanding problems in star formation, including the mechanism of massive star formation, the origin of the stellar initial mass function and its relationship to the core mass function, the demographics of massive binaries, and the equation of state in star-forming gas.