Gravitational instability of non-isothermal filamentary molecular clouds in presence of external pressure

Abstract

ABSTRACT Filamentary molecular clouds are omnipresent in the cold interstellar medium. Observational pieces of evidence show that the non-isothermal equations of state describe the filaments properties better than the isothermal one. In this paper, we use the logatropic and the polytropic equations of state to study the gravitational instability of the pressure-confined filaments in presence of a uniform axial magnetic field. To fully explore the parameter space, we carry out very large surveys of stability analysis that cover filaments with different radii in various magnetic fields. Our results show that for all the equations of state the instability of thinner filaments is more sensitive to the magnetic field variations than the thicker ones. Moreover, for all the equations of state, an intermediate magnetic field can entirely stabilize the thinner filaments. Albeit for the thicker ones, this effect is suppressed for the magnetic field stronger than B ≃ 70 μG.