Description
The formation of high-mass star-forming regions from their parental gas cloud and the subsequent fragmentation processes lie at the heart of star formation research. We aim to study the dynamical and fragmentation properties at very early evolutionary stages of high-mass star formation. Employing the NOrthern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA) and the IRAM 30m telescope, we observe two young high-mass star-forming regions, ISOSS22478 and ISOSS23053, in the 1.3mm continuum and spectral line emission at high angular resolution (~0.8''). Resolving altogether 29 cores that are largely located along filament-like structures, we find that these cores follow a mass-size relation of approximately M~r^3^, corresponding to a constant mean density of roughly 10^6cm^-3^. The correlation of the core masses with their nearest neighbor separations is consistent with thermal Jeans fragmentation. Although the kinematics of the two regions appear very different at first sight -- multiple velocity components along filaments in ISOSS22478 versus a steep velocity gradient of more than 50km/s/pc in ISOSS23053 -- the findings can all be explained in the framework of a dynamical cloud collapse scenario. While our data are consistent with a dynamical cloud collapse scenario and subsequent thermal Jeans fragmentation, the importance of additional environmental properties -- e.g., the magnetization of the gas or external shocks triggering converging gas flows -- is still less well constrained and requires future investigation.
|