English

CMR exploration I -- filament structure with synthetic observations

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2023-04-19 v2 Plasma Physics

Abstract

In this paper, we carry out a pilot parameter exploration for the collision-induced magnetic reconnection (CMR) mechanism that forms filamentary molecular clouds. Following Kong et al. (2021), we utilize Athena++ to model CMR in the context of resistive magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), considering the effect from seven physical conditions, including the Ohmic resistivity (η\eta), the magnetic field (BB), the cloud density (ρ\rho), the cloud radius RR, the isothermal temperature TT, the collision velocity vxv_x, and the shear velocity vzv_z. Compared to their fiducial model, we consider a higher and a lower value for each one of the seven parameters. We quantify the exploration results with five metrics, including the density probability distribution function (ρ\rho-PDF), the filament morphology (250 μ\mum dust emission), the BB-ρ\rho relation, the dominant fiber width, and the ringiness that describes the significance of the ring-like sub-structures. The exploration forms straight and curved CMR-filaments with rich sub-structures that are highly variable in space and time. The variation translates to fluctuation in all the five metrics, reflecting the chaotic nature of magnetic reconnection in CMR. A temporary BρB\propto\rho relation is noticeable during the first 0.6 Myr. Overall, the exploration provides useful initial insights to the CMR mechanism.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.08336,
  title  = {CMR exploration I -- filament structure with synthetic observations},
  author = {Shuo Kong and Volker Ossenkopf-Okada and Héctor G. Arce and Ralf S. Klessen and Duo Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.08336},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

31 pages, 20 figures, 1 table, accepted by ApJS, add link to Dataverse

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:41:53.737Z