Magnetohydrodynamic simulations of mechanical stellar feedback in a sheet-like molecular cloud

We have used the adaptive-mesh-refinement hydrodynamic code, mg, to perform 3D magnetohydrodynamic simulations with self-gravity of stellar feedback in a sheet-like molecular cloud formed through the action of the thermal instability. We simulate the interaction of the mechanical energy input from a 15 star and a 40 M⊙ star into a 100 pc-diameter 17 000 M⊙ cloud with a corrugated sheet morphology that in projection appears filamentary. The stellar winds are introduced using appropriate Geneva stellar evolution models. In the 15 M⊙ star case, the wind forms a narrow bipolar cavity with minimal effect on the parent cloud. In the 40 M⊙ star case, the more powerful stellar wind creates a large cylindrical cavity through the centre of the cloud. After 12.5 and 4.97 Myr, respectively, the massive stars explode as supernovae (SNe). In the 15 M⊙ star case, the SN material and energy is primarily deposited into the molecular cloud surroundings over ∼10^5 yr before the SN remnant escapes the cloud. In the 40 M⊙ star case, a significant fraction of the SN material and energy rapidly escapes the molecular cloud along the wind cavity in a few tens of kiloyears. Both SN events compress the molecular cloud material around them to higher densities (so may trigger further star formation), and strengthen the magnetic field, typically by factors of 2–3 but up to a factor of 10. Our simulations are relevant to observations of bubbles in flattened ring-like molecular clouds and bipolar Hii regions.