The effect of tidal forces on the Jeans instability criterion in star-forming regions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent works have proposed the idea of a tidal screening scenario, in which gravitationally unstable fragments in the vicinity of a protostar will compete for the gas reservoir in a star-forming clump. In this contribution, we propose to properly include the action of an external gravitational potential in the Jeans linear instability analysis as proposed by Jog. We found that an external gravitational potential can reduce the critical mass required for the perturbation to collapse if the tidal forces are compressive or increase it if the tidal forces are disruptive. Our treatment provides (a) new mass and length collapse conditions; (b) a simple equation for observers to check whether their observed fragments can collapse; and (c) a simple equation to compute whether collapse-induced turbulence can produce the levels of observed fragmentation. Our results suggest that, given envelopes with similar mass and density, the flatter ones should produce more stars than the steeper ones. If the density profile is a power law, the corresponding power-law index separating these two regimes should be about 1.5. We finally applied our formalism to 160 fragments identified within 18 massive star-forming cores of previous works. We found that considering tides, 49 per cent of the sample may be gravitationally unstable and that it is unlikely that turbulence acting at the moment of collapse has produced the fragmentation of these cores. Instead, these fragments should have formed earlier when the parent core was substantially flatter.