The formation of pillars of dense gas at the boundaries of H II Regions is
investigated with hydrodynamical numerical simulations including ionising
radiation from a point source. We show that shadowing of ionising radiation by
an inhomogeneous density field is capable of forming so-called elephant trunks
(pillars of dense gas as in e.g. M16) without the assistance of self-gravity,
or of ionisation front and cooling instabilities. A large simulation of a
density field containing randomly generated clumps of gas is shown to naturally
generate elephant trunks with certain clump configurations. These
configurations are simulated in isolation and analysed in detail to show the
formation mechanism and determine possible observational signatures. Pillars
formed by the shadowing mechanism are shown to have rather different velocity
profiles depending on the initial gas configuration, but asymmetries mean that
the profiles also vary significantly with perspective, limiting their ability
to discriminate between formation scenarios. Neutral and molecular gas cooling
are shown to have a strong effect on these results.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, MNRAS. Minor revisions: typos corrected,
figures re-ordered to match published versio
