AAS 201st Meeting, January, 2003
Session 60. Star Formation I
Oral, Tuesday, January 7, 2003, 10:00-11:30am, 602-604

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[60.01] Radiative Feedback in Star Cluster Formation

J. E. Dale (Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University)

We present the results of simulations of star cluster formation including for the first time radiative feedback from massive young stars. We use a new fast algorithm able to perform simple radiative transfer in three dimensions in highly inhomogeneous environments, characteristic of star-forming regions such as the Orion Molecular Cloud. Taking as our initial conditions the end result of a simulation performed by Bonnell and Bate (Bonnell and Bate, 2002) of the formation of a star cluster from a molecular cloud containing 1000 Jeans masses of gas, we study the effects of the photoionising radiation emitted by the first massive star to form within the cloud. We find that, if the gas density in the immediate vicinity of the star is insufficient to absorb the stellar radiation, photoionisation heating is an efficient mechanism for expelling gas from the cluster.

For the sake of simplicity, we have only modelled the feedback of a single star, but in principle, the code can simulate the action of an arbitrary number of radiation sources. The simulations were performed in the context of the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code of Bate et al (Bate, 1995).

This work was sponsored by the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, and simulations were performed on the United Kingdom Astrophysical Fluids Facility SGI Origin 3800 at Leicester University, UK.


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