Oral Presentation

The link between Magnetic-field Orientation and Star Formation Rates: From a simulation prospective

Author(s): Guo Zitan (the Chinese University of Hong Kong); Li Hua-bai (the Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Presenter: Zitan Guo (the Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Interstellar filaments are important for star formation processes and enormous amount of papers have been studying the fragmentation of filaments. As revealed in the recent observational work [1], different magnetic field orientations can have effects on star formation rate. In general, filaments with magnetic fields parallel to them will have higher star formation rates per unit mass, compared to those with perpendicular magnetic fields. Here, we present the results of MHD simulations investigating the effect of magnetic orientation on the local collapse of filaments in turbulent medium. We vary the mass per unit length (linear mass) as well as the magnetic field orientations in different setups. For each simulation setup, we inject the turbulent energy until the system reaches virial equilibrium. We maintain the virial equilibrium and study the local collapses. We find the result is consistent for different linear masses –– the filaments with parallel magnetic field have higher ratio of bounded masses than the perpendicular cases.

[1] Li, H.-b., Jiang, H., Fan, X., Gu, Q. & Zhang, Y. The link between magnetic field orientations and star formation rates.Nat. Astron. 1, 0158 (2017).