Work

Dust Growth in Evolving Filamentary Molecular Clouds: Signatures in Ionization, Resistivity, and Infrared Scattering

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Studies of dust growth in molecular clouds often prescribe the collapse history, leaving unclear how magnetic regulation of core formation shapes dust evolution and its observable and nonideal MHD signatures. We address this problem by performing one-zone dust evolution and ionization calculations along time-dependent density and magnetic-field histories extracted from three-dimensional nonideal MHD simulations of core formation through filament fragmentation. A stronger initial magnetic field delays contraction and thereby gives dust grains more time to grow at a given density. In our models, this delayed contraction leads to mass-weighted mean dust sizes of 1.2 and 3.1 μ m at n H = 10 6 cm −3 for B ini = 20 and 50 μ G, respectively. The associated depletion of very small dust grains reduces the adsorption of charged particles onto dust grain surfaces and lowers the conductivity: relative to models without dust growth, the ionization fraction increases from ∼10 −9 to ∼10 −8 , the ambipolar resistivity increases, and the ion–neutral drift velocity rises to several m s −1 in the weak-magnetic-field model and approximately 10 m s −1 in the strong-magnetic-field model. These drift velocities remain below the observationally suggested range of 30–100 m s −1 , indicating that still stronger magnetic fields may be required. The evolved dust populations also attain single-scattering albedos of order ω λ ∼ 0.8 at 3.6–4.5 μ m, with the stronger field shifting the onset of efficient infrared scattering toward lower densities. These results demonstrate that the magnetically controlled collapse timescale, rather than density alone, links dust growth to ionization, ambipolar diffusion, and infrared scattering in prestellar cores.

Source: The Astrophysical Journal

DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aea978