Related papers: Turbulent Driving Scales in Molecular Clouds
This chapter reviews the nature of turbulence in the Galactic interstellar medium (ISM) and its connections to the star formation (SF) process. The ISM is turbulent, magnetized, self-gravitating, and is subject to heating and cooling…
The formation of astrophysical structures, such as stars, compact objects but also galaxies, entail an,enhancement of densities by many orders of magnitude which occurs through gravitational collapse. The role played by turbulence during…
We present numerical studies of compressible, decaying turbulence, with and without magnetic fields, with initial rms Alfven and Mach numbers ranging up to five, and apply the results to the question of the support of star-forming…
A roughly constant temperature over a wide range of densities is maintained in molecular clouds through radiative heating and cooling. An isothermal equation of state is therefore frequently employed in molecular cloud simulations. However,…
Molecular clouds are essentially made up of atomic and molecular hydrogen, which in spite of being the simplest molecule in the ISM plays a key role in the chemical evolution of molecular clouds. Since its formation time is very long, the…
Interstellar gas clouds are often both highly magnetized and supersonically turbulent, with velocity dispersions set by a competition between driving and dissipation. This balance has been studied extensively in the context of gases with…
Aerosol-cloud interactions represent the largest uncertainty in climate-change assessment, and while cloud turbulence is considered crucial for droplet growth, its precise role remains unclear. Our laboratory-controlled studies show that…
The chemistry of molecular clouds has been studied for decades, with an increasingly general and sophisticated treatment of the reactions involved. Yet the treatment of turbulent diffusion has remained extremely sketchy, assuming simple…
The Interstellar Medium (ISM) is a complex, multi-phase system, where the history of the stars occurs. The processes of birth and death of stars are strongly coupled to the dynamics of the ISM. The observed chaotic and diffusive motions of…
Interstellar turbulence is driven over a wide range of scales by processes including spiral arm instabilities and supernovae, and it affects the rate and morphology of star formation, energy dissipation, and angular momentum transfer in…
The life-cycle, structure, and dynamics of the interstellar medium (ISM) is regulated by turbulence. Complex physical processes, including supernova (SN) explosions, shear, and gravitational collapse, drive and maintain turbulence, but it…
Compressible turbulence shapes the structure of the interstellar medium of our Galaxy and likely plays an important role also during structure formation in the early Universe. The density PDF and the power spectrum of such compressible,…
The fractal shape and multi-component nature of the interstellar medium together with its vast range of dynamical scales provides one of the great challenges in theoretical and numerical astrophysics. Here we will review recent progress in…
We re-analyze the data of the BU-FCRAO $^{13}{\rm CO}$ Galactic Ring Survey (GRS) to understand the dynamics of the turbulent molecular interstellar medium. We define molecular clouds by their spatial half-power contours of $^{13}{\rm CO}$…
Star formation is inefficient. Only a few percent of the available gas in molecular clouds forms stars, leading to the observed low star formation rate (SFR). The same holds when averaged over many molecular clouds, such that the SFR of…
We present a self-consistent hydrodynamical simulation of a Milky Way-like galaxy, at the resolution of 0.05 pc. The model includes star formation and a new implementation of stellar feedback through photo-ionization, radiative pressure and…
We investigate the feedback of the stellar jets on the surrounding interstellar gas based on 2D and 3D simulations applying HD and MHD module of PLUTO 4.2 code. The main question we address is whether the stellar jet can be considered as a…
Star forming molecular clouds are observed to be both highly magnetized and turbulent. Consequently the formation of protostellar disks is largely dependent on the complex interaction between gravity, magnetic fields, and turbulence.…
Stars and star clusters form by gravoturbulent fragmentation of interstellar gas clouds. The supersonic turbulence ubiquitously observed in Galactic molecular gas generates strong density fluctuations with gravity taking over in the densest…
The formation of stars is inextricably linked to the structure of their parental molecular clouds. Here we take a number of nearby giant molecular clouds (GMCs) and analyse their column density and mass distributions. This investigation is…