Physical Properties of Dense Cores in the Rho Ophiuchi Main Cloud and A Significant Role of External Pressures in Clustered Star Formation

Using the archive data of the H13CO+ (J=1-0) line emission taken with the Nobeyama 45 m radio telescope with a spatial resolution of about 0.01pc, we have identified 68 dense cores in the central dense region of the rho Ophiuchi main cloud. The H13CO+ data also indicates that the fractional abundance of H13CO+ relative to H2 is roughly inversely proportional to the square root of the H2 column density with a mean of 1.72 x 10^{-11}. The mean radius, FWHM line width, and LTE mass of the identified cores are estimated to be 0.045 +- 0.011 pc, 0.49 +- 0.14 km/s, and 3.4 +- 3.6 Msolar, respectively. The majority of the identified cores have subsonic internal motions. The virial ratio, the ratio of the virial mass to the LTE mass, tends to decrease with increasing the LTE mass and about 60 percent of the cores have virial ratios smaller than 2, indicating that these cores are not transient structures but self-gravitating. The detailed virial analysis suggests that the surface pressure often dominates over the self-gravity and thus plays a crucial role in regulating core formation and evolution. By comparing the rho Oph cores with those in the Orion A molecular cloud observed with the same telescope, we found that the statistical properties of the core physical quantities are similar between the two clouds if the effect of the different spatial resolutions is corrected. The line widths of the rho Oph cores appear to be nearly independent of the core radii over the range of 0.01 - 0.1 pc and deviate upwards from the Heyer & Brunt relation. This may be evidence that turbulent motions are driven by protostellar outflows in the cluster environment.Comment: 45 pages, 14 figures, accepted or publication in ApJ, mpeg movies of figure 3 are available from http://quasar1.ed.niigata-u.ac.jp/~fnakamur/papers/oph1

Telescopes versus Microscopes: the puzzle of Iron-60

The discovery that the short-lived radionucleide iron-60 was present in the oldest meteorites suggests that the formation of the Earth closely followed the death of a massive star. I discuss three astrophysical origins: winds from an AGB star, injection of supernova ejecta into circumstellar disks, and induced star formation on the boundaries of HII regions. I show that the first two fail to match the solar system iron-60 abundance in the vast majority of star forming systems. The cores and pillars on the edges of HII regions are spectacular but rare sites of star formation and larger clumps with masses 1e3-1e4 solar masses at tens of parsec from a supernova are a more likely birth environment for our Sun. I also examine gamma-ray observations of iron-60 decay and show that the Galactic background could account for the low end of the range of meteoritic measurements if the massive star formation rate was at least a factor of 2 higher 4.6 Gyr ago.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of the Les Houches Winter School "Physics and Astrophysics of Planetary Systems", (EDP Sciences: EAS Publications Series