Destruction of Giant Molecular Clouds by UV Radiation Feedback from Massive Stars

Star formation in galaxies predominantly takes place in giant molecular clouds (GMCs). While it is widely believed that UV radiation feedback from young massive stars can destroy natal GMCs by exciting HII regions and driving their expansion, our understanding on how this actually occurs remains incomplete. To quantitatively assess the effect of UV radiation feedback on cloud disruption, we conduct a series of theoretical studies on the dynamics of HII regions and its role in controlling the star formation efficiency (SFE) and lifetime of GMCs in a wide range of star-forming environments. We first develop a semi-analytic model for the expansion of spherical dusty HII regions driven by the combination of gas and radiation pressures, finding that GMCs in normal disk galaxies are destroyed by gas-pressure driven expansion with SFE < 10%, while more dense and massive clouds with higher SFE are disrupted primarily by radiation pressure. Next, we turn to radiation hydrodynamic simulations of GMC dispersal to allow for self-consistent star formation as well as inhomogeneous density and velocity structures arising from supersonic turbulence. For this, we develop an efficient parallel algorithm for ray tracing method, which enables us to probe a range of cloud masses and sizes. Our parameter study shows that the net SFE, lifetime (measured in units of free-fall time), and the importance of radiation pressure (relative to photoionization) increase primarily with the initial surface density of the cloud. Unlike in the idealized spherical model, we find that the dominant mass loss mechanism is photoevaporation rather than dynamical ejection and that a significant fraction of radiation escapes through low optical-depth channels. We will discuss the astronomical.