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MHD Turbulence is common in many space physics and astrophysics environments. We first discuss the properties of incompressible MHD turbulence. A well-conductive fluid amplifies initial magnetic fields in a process called small-scale…
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…
{It is well established that the atomic interstellar hydrogen is filling the galaxies and constitutes the building blocks of molecular clouds.} {To understand the formation and the evolution of molecular clouds, it is necessary to…
We study modulational stability and instability in the Whitham equation, combining the dispersion relation of water waves and a nonlinearity of the shallow water equations, and modified to permit the effects of surface tension and constant…
Molecular clouds (MCs) are stellar nurseries, however, formation of stars within MCs depends on the ambient physical conditions. MCs, over a free-fall time are exposed to numerous dynamical phenomena, of which, the interaction with a thin,…
How molecular clouds fragment and create the dense structures which go on to form stars is an open question. We investigate the relative importance of different energy terms (kinetic, thermal, magnetic, and gravity - both self-gravity and…
Molecular clouds (MC) are structures of dense gas in the interstellar medium (ISM), that extend from ten to a few hundred parsecs and form the main gas reservoir available for star formation. Hydrodynamical simulations of varying complexity…
Formation of turbulence of capillary waves is studied in laboratory experiments. The spectra show multiple exponentially decreasing harmonics of the parametrically excited wave which nonlinearly broaden with the increase in forcing.…
(Abridged) The formation of molecular clouds (MCs) from the diffuse interstellar gas appears to be a necessary step for star formation, as young stars invariably occur within them. However, the mechanisms controlling the formation of MCs…
Motivated by recent observational searches of sub-structure in starless molecular cloud cores, we investigate the evolution of density perturbations on scales smaller than the Jeans length embedded in contracting isothermal clouds, adopting…
In this course we review the theory of incompressible homogeneous turbulence at an elementary level, and discuss the similarities and differences expected in the compressible case, relevant to the interstellar medium and molecular clouds.…
Though flux freezing is a good approximation frequently assumed for molecular clouds, ambipolar diffusion (AD) is inevitable at certain scales. The scale at which AD sets in can be a crucial parameter for turbulence and the star formation…
The interstellar medium (ISM) is a key ingredient of galaxies and their evolution, consisting of multiphase, turbulent dust and gas. Some of the star-forming regions in our Galaxy originate from cloud-cloud and wind-cloud collisions, which…
We derive a weak turbulence formalism for incompressible MHD. Three-wave interactions lead to a system of kinetic equations for the spectral densities of energy and helicity. We find energy spectra solution of the kinetic equations. The…
Intercluster medium is expected to be turbulent with turbulence being superAlfvenic at large scales. Magnetic fields substantially modify the turbulent cascade when the turbulence reaches the scales at which the fluctuation velocity gets…
A magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) shock front can be unstable to the corrugation instability, which causes a perturbed shock front to become increasingly corrugated with time. An ideal MHD parallel shock (where the velocity and magnetic fields…
The turbulent destruction of a cloud subject to the passage of an adiabatic shock is studied. We find large discrepancies between the lifetime of the cloud and the analytical result of Hartquist et al. (1986). These differences appear to be…
Galaxies comprise intricate networks of interdependent processes which together govern their evolution. Central among these are the multiplicity of feedback channels, which remain incompletely understood. One outstanding problem is the…
We perform three dimensional (3D) ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations to study the parametric decay instability of Alfven waves in turbulent plasmas and explore its possible applications in the solar wind. We find that, over a broad…
Many astrophysical fluids are magnetized and turbulent. Such fluids can be often described by magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). In this review, we mainly consider MHD turbulence with a strong mean magnetic field whose energy density is greater…