Dynamic Cores in Hydrostatic Disguise

Abstract

We discuss the column density profiles of in three-dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) numerical simulations of turbulent molecular clouds. The SPH scheme allows us to perform a high spatial resolution analysis of the density maxima (cores) at scales between ~0.003 and 0.3 pc. We analyze simulations in three different physical conditions: large-scale driving (LSD), small-scale driving (SSD), and random Gaussian initial conditions without driving (GC), each one at two different time steps: just before self-gravity is turned on (t0) and when gravity has been operating such that 5% of the total mass in the box has been accreted into cores (t1). For this data set, we perform Bonnor-Ebert fits to the column density profiles of cores found by a clump-finding algorithm. We find that, for the particular fitting procedure we use, 65% of the cores can be matched to Bonnor-Ebert (BE) profiles, and of these, 47% correspond to stable equilibrium configurations with ξmax < 6.5, even though the cores analyzed in the simulations are not in equilibrium but instead are dynamically evolving. The temperatures obtained with the fitting procedure vary between 5 and 60 K (in spite of the simulations being isothermal, with T = 11.3 K), with the peak of the distribution being at T = 11 K and most clumps having fitted temperatures between 5 and 30 K. Central densities obtained with the BE fit tend to be smaller than the actual central densities of the cores. We also find that for the LSD and GC cases, there are more BE-like cores at t0 than at t1 with ξmax ≤ 20, while in the case of SSD, there are more such cores at t1 than at t0. We interpret this as a consequence of the stronger turbulence present in the cores of run SSD, which prevents good BE fits in the absence of gravity, and delays collapse in its presence. Finally, in some cases we find substantial superposition effects when we analyze the projection of the density structures, even though the scales over which we project are small (0.18 pc). As a consequence, different projections of the same core may give very different values of the BE fits. Finally, we briefly discuss recent results claiming that Bok globule B68 is in hydrostatic equilibrium, stressing that they imply that this core is unstable by a wide margin. We conclude that fitting BE profiles to observed cores is not an unambiguous test of hydrostatic equilibrium and that fit-estimated parameters such as mass, central density, density contrast, temperature, or radial profile of the BE sphere may differ significantly from the actual values in the cores.