GRAVITATIONAL INFALL ONTO MOLECULAR FILAMENTS. II. EXTERNALLY PRESSURIZED CYLINDERS

Two aspects of the evolution of externally pressurized, hydrostatic filaments are discussed. (1) The free-fall accretion of gas onto such a filament will lead to filament parameters (specifically, FWHM-column-density relations) inconsistent with the observations of Arzoumanian et al., except for two cases: for low-mass, isothermal filaments, agreement is found as in the analysis by Fischera and Martin. Magnetized cases, for which the field scales weakly with the density as B∝n 1/2, also reproduce observed parameters. (2) Realistically, the filaments will be embedded not only in gas of non-zero pressure, but also of non-zero density. Thus, the appearance of sheet-embedded filaments is explored. Generating a grid of filament models and comparing the resulting column density ratios and profile shapes with observations suggests that the three-dimensional filament profiles are intrinsically flatter than isothermal, beyond projection and evolution effects