Thermal Effects of Ambipolar Diffusion during the Gravitational Collapse of a Radiative Cooling Filament

Abstract

Abstract In this study, we consider the effects of ambipolar diffusion during the gravitational collapse of a radiative cooling filamentary molecular cloud. Two separate configurations of magnetic field, i.e., axial and toroidal, are considered in the presence of the ambipolar diffusion for a radiative cooling filament. These configurations lead to two different formulations of the problem. The filament is radiatively cooled and heated by ambipolar diffusion in both cases of magnetic field configurations. The self-similar method is used to solve the obtained equations in each case. We found that the adiabatic exponent and ambipolar diffusivity play very important roles during the gravitational collapse of a cooling filament. The results show that the ambipolar heating significantly increases the temperature in the middle regions of a cooling filament. Furthermore, we found that the ambipolar diffusion has very important effects during the collapse, so that its heating effect is dominant over its dynamical effect in the middle regions of a cooling filament. The obtained results also address some regions where the rate of star formation is more or less compared to the observational reports.