Cardiff University | Prifysgol Caerdydd ORCA
Online Research @ Cardiff 
WelshClear Cookie - decide language by browser settings

Forming isolated brown dwarfs by turbulent fragmentation

Lomax, Oliver David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1641-4318, Whitworth, Anthony Peter ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1178-5486 and Hubber, D. A. 2016. Forming isolated brown dwarfs by turbulent fragmentation. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 458 (2) , pp. 1242-1252. 10.1093/mnras/stw406

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

We use Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics to explore the circumstances under which an isolated very low mass pre-stellar 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 André et al. have identified as a pre-stellar core with mass between ∼0.020 M⊙ and ∼0.030 M⊙. We re-analyse 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 ∼0.075 M⊙, 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 pre-stellar cores.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Physics and Astronomy
Advanced Research Computing @ Cardiff (ARCCA)
Subjects: Q Science > QB Astronomy
Q Science > QC Physics
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISSN: 0035-8711
Date of Acceptance: 18 February 2016
Last Modified: 01 Nov 2022 09:53
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/89551

Citation Data

Cited 9 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item Edit Item