arXiv subjects

D. A. Hubber

Publications and source records attributed to D. A. Hubber.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2017

Filamentary fragmentation in a turbulent medium

We present the results of smoothed particle hydrodynamic simulations investigating the evolution and fragmentation of filaments that are accreting from a turbulent medium. We show that the presence of turbulence, and the resulting inhomogeneities in the accretion flow, play a significant role in the fragmentation process. Filaments which experience a weakly turbulent accretion flow fragment in a two-tier hierarchical fashion, similar to the fragmentation pattern seen in the Orion Integral Shaped Filament. Increasing the energy in the turbulent velocity field results in more sub-structure within the filaments, and one sees a shift from gravity-dominated fragmentation to turbulence-dominated fragmentation. The sub-structure formed in the filaments is elongated and roughly parallel to the longitudinal axis of the filament, similar to the fibres seen in observations of Taurus, and suggests that the fray and fragment scenario is a possible mechanism for the production of fibres. We show that the formation of these fibre-like structures is linked to the vorticity of the velocity field inside the filament and the filament's accretion from an inhomogeneous medium. Moreover, we find that accretion is able to drive and sustain roughly sonic levels of turbulence inside the filaments, but is not able to prevent radial collapse once the filaments become supercritical. However, the supercritical filaments which contain fibre-like structures do not collapse radially, suggesting that fibrous filaments may not necessarily become radially unstable once they reach the critical line-density.

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arXiv2016

Forming isolated brown dwarfs by turbulent fragmentation

We use Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics to explore the circumstances under which an isolated very-low-mass prestellar core can be formed by colliding turbulent flows and collapse to form a brown-dwarf. Our simulations suggest that the flows need not be very fast, but do need to be very strongly convergent, i.e. the gas must flow in at comparable speeds from all sides, which seems rather unlikely. We therefore revisit the object Oph-B11, which Andre, Ward-Thompson and Greaves (2012) have identified as a prestellar core with mass between $\sim 0.020\,\mathrm{M_\odot}$ and $\sim 0.030\,\mathrm{M_\odot}$. We reanalyse the observations using a Markov-chain Monte Carlo method that allows us (i) to include the uncertainties on the distance, temperature and dust mass opacity, and (ii) to consider different Bayesian prior distributions of the mass. We estimate that the posterior probability that Oph-B11 has a mass below the hydrogen burning limit at $\sim 0.075\,\mathrm{M_\odot}$, is between 0.66 and 0.86. We conclude that, if Oph-B11 is destined to collapse, it probably will form a brown dwarf. However, the flows required to trigger this appear to be so contrived that it is difficult to envisage this being the only way, or even a major way, of forming isolated brown dwarfs. Moreover, Oph-B11 could easily be a transient, bouncing, prolate core, seen end-on; there could, indeed should, be many such objects masquerading as very low-mass prestellar cores.

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arXiv2015

The Role of Discs in the Collapse and Fragmentation of Prestellar Cores

Disc fragmentation provides an important mechanism for producing low mass stars in prestellar cores. Here, we describe Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations which show how populations of prestellar cores evolve into stars. We find the observed masses and multiplicities of stars can be recovered under certain conditions. First, protostellar feedback from a star must be episodic. The continuous accretion of disc material on to a central protostar results in local temperatures which are too high for disc fragmentation. If, however, the accretion occurs in intense outbursts, separated by a downtime of $\sim10^4\,\mathrm{years}$, gravitational instabilities can develop and the disc can fragment. Second, a significant amount of the cores' internal kinetic energy should be in solenoidal turbulent modes. Cores with less than a third of their kinetic energy in solenoidal modes have insufficient angular momentum to form fragmenting discs. In the absence of discs, cores can fragment but results in a top heavy distribution of masses with very few low mass objects.

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arXiv2015

Observing gas and dust in simulations of star formation with Monte Carlo radiation transport on Voronoi meshes

Ionising feedback from massive stars dramatically affects the interstellar medium local to star forming regions. Numerical simulations are now starting to include enough complexity to produce morphologies and gas properties that are not too dissimilar from observations. The comparison between the density fields produced by hydrodynamical simulations and observations at given wavelengths relies however on photoionisation/chemistry and radiative transfer calculations. We present here an implementation of Monte Carlo radiation transport through a Voronoi tessellation in the photoionisation and dust radiative transfer code MOCASSIN. We show for the first time a synthetic spectrum and synthetic emission line maps of an hydrodynamical simulation of a molecular cloud affected by massive stellar feedback. We show that the approach on which previous work is based, which remapped hydrodynamical density fields onto Cartesian grids before performing radiative transfer/photoionisation calculations, results in significant errors in the temperature and ionisation structure of the region. Furthermore, we describe the mathematical process of tracing photon energy packets through a Voronoi tessellation, including optimisations, treating problematic cases and boundary conditions. We perform various benchmarks using both the original version of MOCASSIN and the modified version using the Voronoi tessellation. We show that for uniform grids, or equivalently a cubic lattice of cell generating points, the new Voronoi version gives the same results as the original Cartesian-grid version of MOCASSIN for all benchmarks. For non-uniform initial conditions, such as using snapshots from Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations, we show that the Voronoi version performs better than the Cartesian grid version, resulting in much better resolution in dense regions.

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arXiv2015

Star Formation triggered by cloud-cloud collisions

We present the results of SPH simulations in which two clouds, each having mass $M_{_{\rm{o}}}\!=\!500\,{\rm M}_{_\odot}$ and radius $R_{_{\rm{o}}}\!=\!2\,{\rm pc}$, collide head-on at relative velocities of $Δv_{_{\rm{o}}} =2.4,\;2.8,\;3.2,\;3.6\;{\rm and}\;4.0\,{\rm km}\,{\rm s}^{-1}$. There is a clear trend with increasing $Δv_{_{\rm{o}}}$. At low $Δv_{_{\rm{o}}}$, star formation starts later, and the shock-compressed layer breaks up into an array of predominantly radial filaments; stars condense out of these filaments and fall, together with residual gas, towards the centre of the layer, to form a single large-$N$ cluster, which then evolves by competitive accretion, producing one or two very massive protostars and a diaspora of ejected (mainly low-mass) protostars; the pattern of filaments is reminiscent of the hub and spokes systems identified recently by observers. At high $Δv_{_{\rm{o}}}$, star formation occurs sooner and the shock-compressed layer breaks up into a network of filaments; the pattern of filaments here is more like a spider's web, with several small-$N$ clusters forming independently of one another, in cores at the intersections of filaments, and since each core only spawns a small number of protostars, there are fewer ejections of protostars. As the relative velocity is increased, the {\it mean} protostellar mass increases, but the {\it maximum} protostellar mass and the width of the mass function both decrease. We use a Minimal Spanning Tree to analyse the spatial distributions of protostars formed at different relative velocities.

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arXiv2015

Comparing simulations of ionisation triggered star formation and observations in RCW 120

Massive clumps within the swept-up shells of bubbles, like that surrounding the galactic HII region RCW 120, have been interpreted in terms of the Collect and Collapse (C&C) mechanism for triggered star formation. The cold, dusty clumps surrounding RCW 120 are arranged in an almost spherical shell and harbour many young stellar objects. By performing high-resolution, three-dimensional SPH simulations of HII regions expanding into fractal molecular clouds, we investigate whether the formation of massive clumps in dense, swept-up shells necessarily requires the C&C mechanism. In a second step, we use RADMC-3D to compute the synthetic dust continuum emission from our simulations, in order to compare them with observations of RCW 120 made with APEX-LABOCA at 870 micron. We show that a distribution of clumps similar to the one seen in RCW 120 can readily be explained by a non-uniform initial molecular cloud structure. Hence, a shell-like configuration of massive clumps does not imply that the C&C mechanism is at work. Rather, we find a hybrid form of triggering, which combines elements of C&C and Radiatively Driven Implosion (RDI). In addition, we investigate the reliability of deriving clump masses from their 870 micron emission. We find that for clumps with more than 100 M_sun the observational estimates are accurate to within a factor of two and that, even at these long wavelengths, it is important to account for the radiative heating from triggered, embedded protostars.

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arXiv2015

On the effects of solenoidal and compressive turbulence in prestellar cores

We present the results of an ensemble of SPH simulations that follow the evolution of prestellar cores for $0.2\,{\rm Myr}$. All the cores have the same mass, and start with the same radius, density profile, thermal and turbulent energy. Our purpose is to explore the consequences of varying the fraction of turbulent energy, $δ_\mathrm{sol}$, that is solenoidal, as opposed to compressive; specifically we consider $δ_\mathrm{sol}=1,\,2/3,\,1/3,\,1/9\;{\rm and}\;0$. For each value of $δ_\mathrm{sol}$, we follow ten different realisations of the turbulent velocity field, in order also to have a measure of the stochastic variance blurring any systematic trends. With low $δ_\mathrm{sol}(<\!1/3)$ filament fragmentation dominates and delivers relatively high mass stars. Conversely, with high values of $δ_\mathrm{sol}(>\!1/3)$ disc fragmentation dominates and delivers relatively low mass stars. There are no discernible systematic trends in the multiplicity statistics obtained with different $δ_\mathrm{sol}$.

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arXiv2014

Simulations of star formation in Ophiuchus, II: Multiplicity

Lomax et al. have constructed an ensemble of 60 prestellar cores having masses, sizes, projected shapes, temperatures and non-thermal radial velocity dispersions that match, statistically, the cores in Ophiuchus; and have simulated the evolution of these cores using SPH. Each core has been evolved once with no radiative feedback from stars, once with continuous radiative feedback, and once with episodic radiative feedback. Here we analyse the multiplicity statistics from these simulations. With episodic radiative feedback, (i) the multiplicity frequency is ~60% higher than in the field; (ii) the multiplicity frequency and the mean semi-major axis both increase with primary mass; (iii) one third of multiple systems are hierarchical systems with more than two components; (iv) in these hierarchical systems the inner pairings typically have separations of a few au and mass ratios concentrated towards unity, whereas the outer pairings have separations of order 100 au and a flatter distribution of mass ratios. The binary statistics are compatible with observations of young embedded populations, and -- if wider orbits are disrupted preferentially by external perturbations -- with observations of mature field populations. With no radiative feedback, the results are similar to those from simulations with episodic feedback. With continuous radiative feedback, brown dwarfs are under-produced, the number of multiple systems is too low, and the statistical properties of multiple systems are at variance with observation. This suggests that star formation in Ophiuchus may only be representative of global star formation if accretion onto protostars, and hence radiative feedback, is episodic.

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arXiv2014

Simulating star formation in Ophiuchus

We have simulated star formation in prestellar cores, using SPH and initial conditions informed by observations of the cores in Ophiuchus. Because the observations are limited to two spatial dimensions plus radial velocity, we cannot infer initial conditions for the collapse of a particular core. However, with a minimum of assumptions (isotropic turbulence with a power-law spectrum, a thermal mix of compressive and solenoidal modes, a critical Bonnor-Ebert density profile) we can generate initial conditions that match, in a statistical sense, the distributions of mass, projected size and aspect ratio, thermal and non-thermal one-dimensional velocity dispersion, observed in Ophiuchus. The time between core-core collisions in Ophiuchus is sufficiently long, that we can simulate single cores evolving is isolation, and therefore we are able to resolve masses well below the opacity limit. We generate an ensemble of 100 cores, and evolve them with no radiative feedback from the stars formed, then with continuous radiative feedback, and finally with episodic radiative feedback. With no feedback the simulations produce too many brown dwarfs, and with continuous feedback too few. With episodic radiative feedback, both the peak of the protostellar mass function (at ~ 0.2 M_sun) and the ratio of H-burning stars to brown dwarfs are consistent with observations. The mass of a star is not strongly related to the mass of the core in which it forms. Low-mass cores (M ~ 0.1 M_sun) tend to collapse into single objects, whereas high-mass cores (1 > M_sun) usually fragment into several objects with a broad mass range.

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arXiv2013

Clumps and triggered star formation in ionised molecular clouds

Infrared shells and bubbles are ubiquitous in the Galaxy and can generally be associated with HII regions formed around young, massive stars. In this paper, we use high-resolution 3D SPH simulations to explore the effect of a single O7 star emitting photons at 10^49 1/s and located at the centre of a molecular cloud with mass 10^4 M_sun and radius 6.4 pc; the internal structure of the cloud is characterised by its fractal dimension, D (with 2.0 <= D <= 2.8), and the variance of its (log-normal) density distribution, sigma_0^2 (with 0.36 <= sigma_0^2 <= 1.42). Our study focuses on the morphology of the swept-up cold gas and the distribution and statistics of the resulting star formation. If the fractal dimension is low, the border of the HII region is dominated by extended shell-like structures, and these break up into a small number of massive high-density clumps which then spawn star clusters; star formation occurs relatively quickly, and delivers somewhat higher stellar masses. Conversely, if the fractal dimension is high, the border of the HII region is dominated by a large number of pillars and cometary globules, which contain compact dense clumps and tend to spawn single stars or individual multiple systems; star formation occurs later, the stellar masses are somewhat lower, and the stars are more widely distributed.

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arXiv2013

Convergence of AMR and SPH simulations - I. Hydrodynamical resolution and convergence tests

We compare the results for a set of hydrodynamical tests performed with the AMR finite volume code, MG and the SPH code, SEREN. The test suite includes shock tube tests, with and without cooling, the non-linear thin-shell instability and the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. The main conclusions are : (i) the two methods converge in the limit of high resolution and accuracy in most cases. All tests show good agreement when numerical effects (e.g. discontinuities in SPH) are properly treated. (ii) Both methods can capture adiabatic shocks and well-resolved cooling shocks perfectly well with standard prescriptions. However, they both have problems when dealing with under-resolved cooling shocks, or strictly isothermal shocks, at high Mach numbers. The finite volume code only works well at 1st order and even then requires some additional artificial viscosity. SPH requires either a larger value of the artificial viscosity parameter, alpha_AV, or a modified form of the standard artificial viscosity term using the harmonic mean of the density, rather than the arithmetic mean. (iii) Some SPH simulations require larger kernels to increase neighbour number and reduce particle noise in order to achieve agreement with finite volume simulations. However, this is partly due to the need to reduce noise that can corrupt the growth of small-scale perturbations. In contrast, instabilities seeded from large-scale perturbations do not require more neighbours and hence work well with standard SPH formulations and converge with the finite volume simulations. (iv) For purely hydrodynamical problems, SPH simulations take an order of magnitude longer to run than finite volume simulations when running at equivalent resolutions, i.e. when they both resolve the underlying physics to the same degree. This requires about 2-3 times as many particles as the number of cells.

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arXiv2013

An improved sink particle algorithm for SPH simulations

Numerical simulations of star formation frequently rely on the implementation of sink particles, (a) to avoid expending computational resource on the detailed internal physics of individual collapsing protostars, (b) to derive mass functions, binary statistics and clustering kinematics (and hence to make comparisons with observation), and (c) to model radiative and mechanical feedback; sink particles are also used in other contexts, for example to represent accreting black holes in galactic nuclei. We present a new algorithm for creating and evolving sink particles in SPH simulations, which appears to represent a significant improvement over existing algorithms {\refrpt -- particularly in situations where sinks are introduced after the gas has become optically thick to its own cooling radiation and started to heat up by adiabatic compression}. (i) It avoids spurious creation of sinks. (ii) It regulates the accretion of matter onto a sink so as to mitigate non-physical perturbations in the vicinity of the sink. (iii) Sinks accrete matter, but the associated angular momentum is transferred back to the surrounding medium. With the new algorithm -- and modulo the need to invoke sufficient resolution to capture the physics preceding sink formation -- the properties of sinks formed in simulations are essentially independent of the user-defined parameters of sink creation, or the number of SPH particles used.

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arXiv2013

A hybrid SPH/N-body method for star cluster simulations

We present a new hybrid Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH)/N-body method for modelling the collisional stellar dynamics of young clusters in a live gas background. By deriving the equations of motion from Lagrangian mechanics we obtain a formally conservative combined SPH/N-body scheme. The SPH gas particles are integrated with a 2nd order Leapfrog, and the stars with a 4th order Hermite scheme. Our new approach is intended to bridge the divide between the detailed, but expensive, full hydrodynamical simulations of star formation, and pure N-body simulations of gas-free star clusters. We have implemented this hybrid approach in the SPH code SEREN (Hubber et al. 2011) and perform a series of simple tests to demonstrate the fidelity of the algorithm and its conservation properties. We investigate and present resolution criteria to adequately resolve the density field and to prevent strong numerical scattering effects. Future developments will include a more sophisticated treatment of binaries.

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arXiv2011

SEREN - A new SPH code for star and planet formation simulations

We present SEREN, a new hybrid Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and N-body code designed to simulate astrophysical processes such as star and planet formation. It is written in Fortran 95/2003 and has been parallelised using OpenMP. SEREN is designed in a flexible, modular style, thereby allowing a large number of options to be selected or disabled easily and without compromising performance. SEREN uses the conservative `grad-h' formulation of SPH, but can easily be configured to use traditional SPH or Godunov SPH. Thermal physics is treated either with a barotropic equation of state, or by solving the energy equation and modelling the transport of cooling radiation. A Barnes-Hut tree is used to obtain neighbour lists and compute gravitational accelerations efficiently, and an hierarchical time-stepping scheme is used to reduce the number of computations per timestep. Dense gravitationally bound objects are replaced by sink particles, to allow the simulation to be evolved longer, and to facilitate the identification of protostars and the compilation of stellar and binary properties. At the termination of a hydrodynamical simulation, SEREN has the option of switching to a pure N-body simulation, using a 4th-order Hermite integrator, and following the ballistic evolution of the sink particles (e.g. to determine the final binary statistics once a star cluster has relaxed). We describe in detail all the algorithms implemented in SEREN and we present the results of a suite of tests designed to demonstrate the fidelity of SEREN and its performance and scalability. Further information and additional tests of SEREN can be found at the web-page http://www.astro.group.shef.ac.uk/seren.

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arXiv2010

Radiation Driven Implosion and Triggered Star Formation

We present simulations of initially stable isothermal clouds exposed to ionizing radiation from a discrete external source, and identify the conditions that lead to radiatively driven implosion and star formation. We use the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics code SEREN (Hubber et al. 2010) and the HEALPix-based photoionization algorithm described in Bisbas et al. (2009). We find that the incident ionizing flux is the critical parameter determining the evolution: high fluxes simply disperse the cloud, whereas low fluxes trigger star formation. We find a clear connection between the intensity of the incident flux and the parameters of star formation.

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arXiv2009

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations of expanding HII regions. I. Numerical methods and tests

We describe a new algorithm for including the dynamical effects of ionizing radiation in SPH simulations, and we present several examples of how the algorithm can be applied to problems in star formation. We use the HEALPix software to tessellate the sky and to solve the equation of ionization equilibrium along a ray towards each of the resulting tesserae. We exploit the hierarchical nature of HEALPix to make the algorithm adaptive, so that fine angular resolution is invoked only where it is needed, and the computational cost is kept low. We present simulations of (i) the spherically symmetric expansion of an HII region inside a uniform-density, non--self-gravitating cloud; (ii) the spherically symmetric expansion of an HII region inside a uniform-density, self-gravitating cloud; (iii) the expansion of an off-centre HII region inside a uniform-density, non--self-gravitating cloud, resulting in rocket acceleration and dispersal of the cloud; and (iv) radiatively driven compression and ablation of a core overrun by an HII region. The new algorithm provides the means to explore and evaluate the role of ionizing radiation in regulating the efficiency and statistics of star formation.

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arXiv2005

Resolution requirements for simulating gravitational fragmentation using SPH

Jeans showed analytically that, in an infinite uniform-density isothermal gas, plane-wave perturbations collapse to dense sheets if their wavelength, $λ$, satisfies $λ> λ_{_{\rm JEANS}} = (πa^2 / G ρ_{_0})^{1/2}$ (where $a$ is the isothermal sound speed and $ρ_{_0}$ is the unperturbed density); in contrast, perturbations with smaller $λ$ oscillate about the uniform density state. Here we show that Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics reproduces these results well, even when the diameters of the SPH particles are twice the wavelength of the perturbation. Our simulations are performed in 3-D with initially settled (i.e. non-crystalline) distributions of particles. Therefore there exists the seed noise for artificial fragmentation, but it does not occur. We conclude that, although there may be -- as with any numerical scheme -- `skeletons in the SPH cupboard', a propensity to fragment artificially is evidently not one of them.

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arXiv2005

Binary star formation from ring fragmentation

We present a simple model of binary star formation based on the assumption that rotating prestellar cores collapse to form rings and these rings then fragment into protostars. We assume that each ring spawns a small number (N <= 6) of protostars, and that the condensation of the protostars is sufficiently rapid that they can subsequently be treated as point masses. We simulate the dynamical evolution of a ring of N stars and record the properties of the single stars, binaries and higher multiples that form as a result of the dissolution of the ring. The masses of the individual stars in a ring are drawn from a log-normal distribution with dispersion σ. This part of the model is perfomed for many different realizations of the ring, to obtain good statistics. The second part of the model is to convolve the results of these dimensionless simulations, first with the distribution of core masses, which yields the distributions of multiplicity,mass ratio and eccentricity, as a function of primary mass; and second with the distribution of core angular momenta, which yields the distributions of semi-major axis and period, again as a function of primary mass. Using the observed distribution of core masses, and the observed distribution of core angular momenta, our model is able to reproduce the observed IMF, the observed high multiplicity frequency of pre-Main Sequence stars, the observed distribution of separations, and -- for long-period systems -- the observed distributions of eccentricity and mass-ratio, provided we invoke N = 4 or 5 and $σ= 0.6$. We presume that the reduced multiplicity frequency in the field, compared with young clusters, is the result of dynamical interactions between stars formed in different cores but the same cluster, following ring dissolution.

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