Evolution of the Hub-filament Structures in IC 5146 in the Context of the Energy Balance of Gravity, Turbulence, and Magnetic Field

Abstract

We present the results of 850 μm polarization and C18O (3 − 2) line observations toward the western hub-filament structure (W-HFS) of the dark Streamer in IC 5146 using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope SCUBA-2/POL-2 and HARP instruments. We aim to investigate how the relative importance of the magnetic field, gravity, and turbulence affects core formation in HFS by comparing the energy budget of this region. We identified four 850 μm cores and estimated the magnetic field strengths (Bpos) of the cores and the hub and filament using the Davis–Chandrasekhar–Fermi method. The estimated Bpos is ∼80 to 1200 μG. From Wang et al., Bpos of E-47, a core in the eastern hub (E-hub), and E-hub were reestimated to be 500 and 320 μG, respectively, with the same method. We measured the gravitational (EG), kinematic (EK), and magnetic energies (EB) in the filament and hubs and compared the relative importance among them. We found that an EB-dominant filament has aligned fragmentation type, while EG-dominant hubs show no and clustered fragmentation types. In the EG dominant hubs, it seems that the portion of EK determines whether the hub becomes to have clustered (the portion of EK ∼ 20%) or no fragmentation type (∼10%). We propose an evolutionary scenario for the E- and W-HFSs, where the HFS forms first by the collision of turbulent flows, and then the hubs and filaments can go into various types of fragmentation depending on their energy balance of gravity, turbulence, and magnetic field.