Strong dependence of the physical properties of cores on spatial resolution in observations and simulations

During the last decade in star formation research, many studies have targeted low- and high-mass star formation regions located at different distances, with different telescopes having specific angular resolution capabilities. We present a systematic investigation of the angular resolution effects, with special attention being paid to the derived masses of sources as well as the shape of the resulting source mass functions (SMFs). We tested the impact of angular resolution, from 0.6 down to 0.02 pc, in two star-forming regions observed with Herschel (NGC6334 and Aquila), and three (magneto)-hydrodynamical simulations. We detected and measured sources at each resolution using getsf and we analysed the derived masses and sizes of the sources. We find that the number of sources does not converge from 0.6 to 0.05 pc. It increases by about two when the angular resolution increases with a similar factor. Below 0.05 pc, the number of source still increases by about 1.3 when the angular resolution increases by two, suggesting that we are close to, but not yet at, convergence. We find that the measured sizes and masses of sources linearly depend on the angular resolution with no sign of convergence to a resolution-independent value. The corresponding SMF peak also shifts with angular resolution, while the slope of the high-mass tail of the SMFs remains almost invariant. If prestellar cores, physically distinct from their background, exist in cluster-forming molecular clouds, we conclude that their mass must be lower than reported so far in the literature. We discuss various implications for the studies of star formation: the problem of determining the mass reservoirs involved in the star-formation process; the inapplicability of the Gaussian beam deconvolution to infer source sizes; and the impossibility to determine the efficiency of the mass conversion from the cores to the stars.