Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 756, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
IOP Publishing Ltd
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/756/2/145
Keywords
ISM: clouds; ISM: structure; stars: formation
Categories
Funding
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- CONACyT [102488]
- CONACyT-SNI (Mexico)
- CSIC JAE-PREDOC (Spain)
- NSERC
- NSF [AST 0807305]
- NHSC [1008]
- UNAM-DGAPA [PAPIIT IN106511]
- Division Of Astronomical Sciences
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [0807305] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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We investigate the collapse of non-spherical substructures, such as sheets and filaments, which are ubiquitous in molecular clouds. Such non-spherical substructures collapse homologously in their interiors but are influenced by an edge effect that causes their edges to be preferentially accelerated. We analytically compute the homologous collapse timescales of the interiors of uniform-density, self-gravitating filaments and find that the homologous collapse timescale scales linearly with the aspect ratio. The characteristic timescale for an edge-driven collapse mode in a filament, however, is shown to have a square-root dependence on the aspect ratio. For both filaments and circular sheets, we find that selective edge acceleration becomes more important with increasing aspect ratio. In general, we find that lower dimensional objects and objects with larger aspect ratios have longer collapse timescales. We show that estimates for star formation rates, based upon gas densities, can be overestimated by an order of magnitude if the geometry of a cloud is not taken into account.
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