The formation of massive molecular filaments and massive stars triggered by a magnetohydrodynamic shock wave

Abstract

Recent observations suggest an that intensive molecular cloud collision can trigger massive star/cluster formation. The most important physical process caused by the collision is a shock compression. In this paper, the influence of a shock wave on the evolution of a molecular cloud is studied numerically by using isothermal magnetohydrodynamics simulations with the effect of self-gravity. Adaptive mesh refinement and sink particle techniques are used to follow the long-time evolution of the shocked cloud. We find that the shock compression of a turbulent inhomogeneous molecular cloud creates massive filaments, which lie perpendicularly to the background magnetic field, as we have pointed out in a previous paper. The massive filament shows global collapse along the filament, which feeds a sink particle located at the collapse center. We observe a high accretion rate $\dot{M}_{\rm acc}> 10^{-4}\, M_{\odot }\:$yr−1 that is high enough to allow the formation of even O-type stars. The most massive sink particle achieves M > 50 M$_{\odot }$ in a few times 105 yr after the onset of the filament collapse.