Gas inflows from cloud to core scales in G332.83-0.55: Hierarchical hub-filament structures and tide-regulated gravitational collapse

¹ Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Auf dem Hügel 69, 53121 Bonn, Germany
e-mail: jwzhou@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
² Max-Planck-Institue für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
³ Department of Physics, PO Box 64, 00014, University of Helsinki, Finland
⁴ National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, 2-21-1 Osawa, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-8588, Japan
⁵ Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 80 Nandan Road, Shanghai 200030, PR China

Received: 6 February 2024
Accepted: 9 March 2024

Abstract

The massive star-forming region G332.83-0.55 contains at least two levels of hub-filament structures. The hub-filament structures may form through the “gravitational focusing” process. High-resolution LAsMA and ALMA observations can directly trace the gas inflows from cloud to core scales. We investigated the effects of shear and tides from the protocluster on the surrounding local dense gas structures. Our results seem to deny the importance of shear and tides from the protocluster. However, for a gas structure, it bears the tidal interactions from all external material, not only the protocluster. To fully consider the tidal interactions, we derived the tide field according to the surface density distribution. Then, we used the average strength of the external tidal field of a structure to measure the total tidal interactions that are exerted on it. For comparison, we also adopted an original pixel-by-pixel computation to estimate the average tidal strength for each structure. Both methods give comparable results. After considering the total tidal interactions, for the scaling relation between the velocity dispersion σ, the effective radius R, and the column density N of all the structures, the slope of the σ − N _* R relation changes from 0.20 ± 0.04 to 0.52 ± 0.03, close to 0.5 of the pure free-fall gravitational collapse, and the correlation also becomes stronger. Thus, the deformation due to the external tides can effectively slow down the pure free-fall gravitational collapse of gas structures. The external tide tries to tear up the structure, but the external pressure on the structure prevents this process. The counterbalance between the external tide and external pressure hinders the free-fall gravitational collapse of the structure, which can also cause the pure free-fall gravitational collapse to be slowed down. These mechanisms can be called “tide-regulated gravitational collapse”.