Related papers: Molecular Cloud Evolution
Improving our understanding of the initial conditions and earliest stages of star formation is crucial to gain insight into the origin of stellar masses, multiple systems, and protoplanetary disks. We review the properties of low-mass dense…
Dense, star-forming gas is believed to form at the stagnation points of large-scale ISM flows, but observational examples of this process in action are rare. We here present a giant molecular cloud (GMC) sandwiched between two colliding…
Star formation is intimately linked to the dynamical evolution of molecular clouds. Turbulent fragmentation determines where and when protostellar cores form, and how they contract and grow in mass via accretion from the surrounding cloud…
Observations and theory both suggest that star clusters form sub-virial (cool) with highly sub-structured distributions. We perform a large ensemble of N-body simulations of moderate-sized (N=1000) cool, fractal clusters to investigate…
We use magnetohydrodynamical simulations of converging warm neutral medium flows to analyse the formation and global evolution of magnetised and turbulent molecular clouds subject to supernova feedback from massive stars. We show that…
To investigate how molecular clouds react to different environmental conditions at a galactic scale, we present a catalogue of giant molecular clouds resolved down to masses of $\sim 10$~M$_{\odot}$ from a simulation of the entire disc of…
Many questions in physical cosmology regarding the thermal history of the intergalactic medium, chemical enrichment, reionization, etc. are thought to be intimately related to the nature and evolution of pregalactic structure. In particular…
We present the results of a study of simulated Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs) formed in a Milky Way-type galactic disk with a flat rotation curve. This simulation, which does not include star formation or feedback, produces clouds with…
Two scenarios have been proposed for evolution of star forming cores: gravitational fragmentation of larger structures and coalescence of smaller entities which are formed from some instabilities. Here, we turn our attention to the latter…
We discuss the role of turbulence in cloud and star formation, as observed in numerical simulations of the interstellar medium. Turbulent compression at the interfaces of colliding gas streams is responsible for the formation of…
We demonstrate that the high pressure of the hot intracluster medium (ICM) can trigger the collapse of molecular clouds in a spiral galaxy, leading to a burst of star formation in the clouds. Our hydrodynamical simulations show that the…
We explore whether observed molecular clouds could include a substantial population of unbound clouds. Using simulations which include only turbulence and gravity, we are able to match observed relations and naturally reproduce the observed…
Recent radio observations show that the giant molecular cloud (GMC) mass functions noticeably vary across galactic disks. High-resolution magnetohydrodynamics simulations show that multiple episodes of compression are required for creating…
In our grid of multiphase chemical evolution models (Moll\'a & D\'iaz, 2005), star formation in the disk occurs in two steps: first, molecular gas forms, and then stars are created by cloud-cloud collisions or interactions of massive stars…
This paper describes 3D simulations of the formation of collapsing cold clumps via thermal instability inside a larger cloud complex. The initial condition was a diffuse atomic, stationary, thermally unstable, 200pc diameter spherical cloud…
We investigate molecular evolution in a star-forming core that is initially a hydrostatic starless core and collapses to form a low-mass protostar. The results of a one-dimensional radiation-hydrodynamics calculation are adopted as a…
We present the results from simulations of GMC formation in spiral galaxies. First we discuss cloud formation by cloud-cloud collisions, and gravitational instabilities, arguing that the former is prevalent at lower galactic surface…
We present an analysis of Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs) within hydrodynamic simulations of isolated, low-mass (M* ~ 10^9 M_sol) disc galaxies. We study the evolution of molecular abundances and the implications for CO emission and the X_CO…
We study the linear evolution of small perturbations in self-gravitating fluid systems in two spatial dimensions; we consider both cylindrical and cartesian (i.e., slab) geometries. The treatment is general, but the application is to…
We present a unified description of the scenario of Global Hierarchical Collapse and fragmentation (GHC) in molecular clouds (MCs), owing to the continuous decrease of the average Jeans mass in the contracting cloud. GHC constitutes a…