Protostellar Feedback in Turbulent Fragmentation: Consequences for Stellar Clustering and Multiplicity

Understand

Stars are strongly clustered on both large (~pc) and small (~binary) scales, but there are few analytic or even semi-analytic theories for the correlation function and multiplicity of stars.

• In this paper we present such a theory, based on our recently-developed semi-analytic framework called MISFIT, which models gravito-turbulent fragmentation, including the suppression of fragmentation by protostellar radiation feedback.
• We compare the results including feedback to a control model in which it is omitted.
• We show that both classes of models robustly reproduce the stellar correlation function at >0.01 pc scales, which is well approximated by a power-law that follows generally from scale-free physics (turbulence plus gravity) on large scales.