Tracking Star-forming Cores as Mass Reservoirs in Clustered and Isolated Regions Using Numerical Passive Tracer Particles

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Abstract Understanding the physical properties of star-forming cores as mass reservoirs for protostars and the impact of turbulence is crucial in star formation studies. We implemented passive tracer particles in clump-scale numerical simulations with turbulence strengths of M rms = 2 , 10 . Unlike core identification methods used in observational studies, we identified 260 star-forming cores using a new method based on tracer particles falling onto protostars. Our findings reveal that star-forming cores do not necessarily coincide with high-density regions when nearby stars are present, as gas selectively accretes onto protostars, leading to clumpy, fragmented structures. We calculated convex hull cores from star-forming cores and defined their filling factors. Regardless of turbulence strength, convex hull cores with lower filling factors tend to contain more protostars and have larger masses and sizes, indicating that cores in clustered regions are more massive and larger than those in isolated regions. Thus, the filling factor serves as a key indicator for distinguishing between isolated and clustered star-forming regions and may provide insights into the star formation processes within clustered regions. We also found that most convex hull cores are gravitationally bound. However, in the M rms = 10 model, there are more low-mass, unbound convex hull cores compared to the M rms = 2 model. In the M rms = 10 model, 16% of the convex hull cores are unbound, which may be explained by the inertial-inflow model. These findings highlight the influence of turbulence strength on the mass and gravitational stability of cores.