Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2012-03-13
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
17 pages, 10 figures, emulateapj format, submitted to ApJ. For movies of simulation results, see http://www.ucolick.org/~krumh
Scientific paper
The pressure exerted by the radiation of young stars may be an important feedback mechanism that drives turbulence and winds in forming star clusters and the disks of starburst galaxies. However, there is great uncertainty in how efficiently radiation couples to matter in these high optical depth environments. In particular, it is unclear what levels of turbulence the radiation can produce, and whether the infrared radiation trapped by the dust opacity can give rise to heavily mass-loaded winds. In this paper we report a series of numerical experiments performed with the radiation-hydrodynamics code ORION in which we drive strong radiation fluxes through columns of dusty matter confined by gravity in order to answer these questions. We consider both systems where the radiation flux is sub-Eddington throughout the gas column, and those where it is super-Eddington at the midplane but sub-Eddington in the atmosphere. In the latter, we find that the radiation-matter interaction gives rise to radiation-driven Rayleigh-Taylor instability, which drives supersonic turbulence at a level sufficient to fully explain the turbulence seen in Galactic protocluster gas clouds, and to make a non-trivial contribution to the turbulence observed in starburst galaxy disks. However, the instability also produces a channel structure in which the radiation-matter interaction is reduced compared to time-steady analytic models because the radiation field is not fully trapped. This effect reduces the net momentum deposition rate in the dusty gas, and in steady state the Eddington ratio reaches unity and there are no strong winds. We provide an approximation formula, appropriate for implementation in analytic models and non-radiative simulations, for the force exerted by the infrared radiation field in this regime.
Krumholz Mark R.
Thompson Todd A.
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