Star-forming environments in smoothed particle magnetohydrodynamics simulations II: re-simulating isolated clumps to determine equivalence of extracted clumps and parent simulations

Abstract

ABSTRACT What is the numerical reproducibility of a stellar system (including its discs) when evolving only a subset of (partially-evolved) smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) particles? To investigate this, we modelled the evolution of 29 star-forming clumps that were extracted from our previous simulations that investigated the formation and early evolution of low-mass star clusters. These clumps were evolved using a three-dimensional smoothed particle radiation magnetohydrodynamics code, where we included or excluded non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics to match the cluster simulation. While star formation proceeded as expected, we were unable to identically reproduce any of the systems present at the end of the cluster simulations. However, the final distributions of stellar mass, stellar system mass, disc mass, and disc radii were reproduced statistically; unfortunately, the distribution of average magnetic field strengths in the discs was not reproduced statistically, but this may be a result of our updated algorithms governing the evolution of the magnetic field. Therefore, given that our clumps yield stellar masses that are statistically similar to those in the original low-mass star clusters, we have demonstrated that we can statistically reproduce systems (aside from their magnetic field strength) by evolving a subset of SPH particles. Therefore, clumps such as these can be used as initial conditions to investigate the formation of isolated stars from less-contrived initial environments.