Resolving the fragmentation of high line-mass filaments with ALMA: the integral shaped filament in Orion A^⋆

¹ Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: jtkainul@mpia.de
² Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Concepción, Av. Esteban Iturra s/n, 160-C Distrito Universitario, Chile
³ ESO, Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany
⁴ School of Physics & Astronomy, E.C. Stoner Building, The University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
⁵ Ritter Astrophsical Research Center, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH 43606, USA

Received: 10 March 2016
Accepted: 26 January 2017

Abstract

We study the fragmentation of the nearest high line-mass filament, the integral shaped filament (ISF, line-mass ~400 M_⊙ pc^-1) in the Orion A molecular cloud. We have observed a 1.6 pc long section of the ISF with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA) at 3 mm continuum emission, at a resolution of ~3″ (1200 AU). We identify from the region 43 dense cores with masses about a solar mass. 60% of the ALMA cores are protostellar and 40% are starless. The nearest neighbour separations of the cores do not show a preferred fragmentation scale; the frequency of short separations increases down to 1200 AU. We apply a two-point correlation analysis on the dense core separations and show that the ALMA cores are significantly grouped at separations below ~17 000 AU and strongly grouped below ~6000 AU. The protostellar and starless cores are grouped differently: only the starless cores group strongly below ~6000 AU. In addition, the spatial distribution of the cores indicates periodic grouping of the cores into groups of ~30 000 AU in size, separated by ~50 000 AU. The groups coincide with dust column density peaks detected by Herschel. These results show hierarchical, two-mode fragmentation in which the maternal filament periodically fragments into groups of dense cores. Critically, our results indicate that the fragmentation models for lower line-mass filaments (~16 M_⊙ pc^-1) fail to capture the observed properties of the ISF. We also find that the protostars identified with Spitzer and Herschel in the ISF are grouped at separations below ~17 000 AU. In contrast, young stars with disks do not show significant grouping. This suggests that the grouping of dense cores is partially retained over the protostar lifetime, but not over the lifetime of stars with disks. This is in agreement with a scenario where protostars are ejected from the maternal filament by the slingshot mechanism, a model recently proposed for the ISF. The separation distributions of the dense cores and protostars may also provide an evolutionary tracer of filament fragmentation.