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We study the behavior of large dust grains in turbulent molecular clouds (MCs). In primarily neutral regions, dust grains move as aerodynamic particles, not necessarily with the gas. We therefore directly simulate, for the first time, the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-11-09 Philip F. Hopkins , Hyunseok Lee

We present the results of a series of numerical simulations of compressible, self-gravitating hydrodynamic turbulence of cluster-forming clumps in molecular clouds. We examine the role that turbulence has in the formation of gravitationally…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 David A. Tilley , Ralph E. Pudritz

The Zeeman effect and dust grain alignment are two major methods for probing magnetic fields (B-fields) in molecular clouds, largely motivated by the study of star formation, as the B-field may regulate gravitational contraction and channel…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-06-16 Hua-bai Li

The dynamics of small-scale structures in free-surface turbulence is crucial to large-scale phenomena in natural and industrial environments. Here we conduct experiments on the quasi-flat free surface of a zero-mean-flow turbulent water…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2025-03-14 Yinghe Qi , Yaxing Li , Filippo Coletti

Guided by the duality of turbulence (random versus coherent we seek coherent structures in the turbulent velocity field of molecular clouds, anticipating their importance in cloud evolution. We analyse a large map (40' by 20') obtained with…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-13 Pierre Hily-Blant , Edith Falgarone

Column density (N) PDFs serve as a powerful tool to characterize the physical processes that influence the structure of molecular clouds. Star-forming clouds can best be characterized by lognormal PDFs for the lower N range and a power-law…

Describing how the properties of the interstellar medium combine across size-scales is crucial for understanding star formation scaling laws and connecting Galactic and extragalactic data of molecular clouds. We describe how the statistical…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-09-15 Andri Spilker , Jouni Kainulainen , Jan Orkisz

The primordial clouds in the mini-halos hatch the first generation stars of the universe, which play a crucial role in cosmic evolution. In this paper, we investigate how the turbulence impacts the structure of primordial star-forming…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-03-14 Ching-Yao Tang , Ke-Jung Chen

We have carried out sub-mm 12CO(J=3-2) observations of 6 giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) with the ASTE 10m sub-mm telescope at a spatial resolution of 5 pc and very high sensitivity. We have identified 32…

(Abridged) We explore, by means of a large ensemble of SPH simulations, how the level of turbulence affects the collapse and fragmentation of a star-forming core. All our simulated cores have the same, except that we vary (a) the initial…

Astrophysics · Physics 2014-10-13 Simon P. Goodwin , Anthony P Whitworth , Derek Ward-Thompson

We develop an automatic bubble-recognition routine based on Minkowski functionals (MF) and tensors (MT) to detect bubble-like interstellar structures in optical emission line images. Minkowski functionals and MT are powerful mathematical…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-09-01 Caroline Collischon , Manami Sasaki , Klaus Mecke , Sean D. Points , Michael A. Klatt

Stars form in the densest regions of molecular clouds, however, there is no universal understanding of the factors that regulate cloud dynamics and their influence on the gas-to-stars conversion. This study considers the impact of Galactic…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-07-01 Raffaele Rani , Jia-Lun Li , Toby J. T. Moore , David J. Eden , Andrew J. Rigby , Geumsook Park , Yueh-Ning Lee

Maps of estimated dust column density in molecular clouds are usually assumed to reliably trace the total gas column density structure. In this work we present results showing a clear discrepancy between the dust and the gas distribution in…

We leverage the 1 pc spatial resolution of the Leike et al. 2020 3D dust map to characterize the three-dimensional structure of nearby molecular clouds ($d \lesssim 400$ pc). We start by "skeletonizing" the clouds in 3D volume density space…

The magnetic field strength in molecular clouds is a fundamental quantity for theories of star formation. It is estimated by Zeeman splitting measurements in a few dense molecular cores, but its volume--averaged value within large molecular…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 Paolo Padoan , Raul Jimenez , Mika Juvela , Aake Nordlund

As both simulations and observations reach the resolution of the star-forming molecular clouds, it becomes important to clarify if these two techniques are discussing the same objects in galaxies. We compare clouds formed in a high…

The mass and size distributions are the key characteristics of any astrophysical objects, including the densest clumps comprising the cold phase of multiphase environments. In our recent papers, we showed how individual clouds of various…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2019-05-01 Tim Waters , Daniel Proga

The dynamic properties of molecular clouds are set by the interplay of their self-gravity, turbulence, external pressure and magnetic fields. Extended surveys of Galactic molecular clouds typically find that their kinetic energy ($E_{\rm…

The rotational properties of centrally condensed, turbulent molecular cloud cores with velocity fields that are characterized by Gaussian random fields are investigated. It is shown that the observed line width-size relationship can be…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-31 Andreas Burkert , Peter Bodenheimer

Within a few parsecs around the central Black Hole Sgr A*, chemistry in the dense molecular cloud material of the circumnuclear disk (CND) can be affected by many energetic phenomena such as high UV-flux from the massive central star…