Triggering Collapse of the Presolar Dense Cloud Core and Injecting Short-lived Radioisotopes with a Shock Wave. V. Nonisothermal Collapse Regime

Abstract

Abstract Recent meteoritical analyses support an initial abundance of the short-lived radioisotope (SLRI) 60Fe that may be high enough to require nucleosynthesis in a core-collapse supernova, followed by rapid incorporation into primitive meteoritical components, rather than a scenario where such isotopes were inherited from a well-mixed region of a giant molecular cloud polluted by a variety of supernovae remnants and massive star winds. This paper continues to explore the former scenario, by calculating three-dimensional, adaptive mesh refinement, hydrodynamical code (FLASH 2.5) models of the self-gravitational, dynamical collapse of a molecular cloud core that has been struck by a thin shock front with a speed of 40 km s−1, leading to the injection of shock front matter into the collapsing cloud through the formation of Rayleigh–Taylor fingers at the shock–cloud intersection. These models extend the previous work into the nonisothermal collapse regime using a polytropic approximation to represent compressional heating in the optically thick protostar. The models show that the injection efficiencies of shock front materials are enhanced compared to previous models, which were not carried into the nonisothermal regime, and so did not reach such high densities. The new models, combined with the recent estimates of initial 60Fe abundances, imply that the supernova triggering and injection scenario remains a plausible explanation for the origin of the SLRIs involved in the formation of our solar system.