Related papers: The Structure of Molecular Clouds: III - A link be…
The magnetic field of molecular clouds (MCs) plays an important role in the process of star formation: it determins the statistical properties of supersonic turbulence that controls the fragmentation of MCs, controls the angular momentum…
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…
Stars are often observed to form in clusters. It is therefore important to understand how such a region of concentrated mass is assembled out of the diffuse medium and its properties eventually prescribe the important physical mechanisms…
Star formation in our Galaxy occurs in molecular clouds that are self-gravitating, highly turbulent, and magnetized. We study the conditions under which cloud cores inherit large-scale magnetic field morphologies and how the field is…
We derive an analytic prediction for the star formation rate in environments ranging from normal galactic disks to starbursts and ULIRGs in terms of the observables of those systems. Our calculation is based on three premises: (1) star…
The empirical laws of star formation suggest that galactic-scale gravity is involved, but they do not identify the actual triggering mechanisms for clusters in the final stages. Many other triggering processes satisfy the empirical laws…
Context. Traditionally, supersonic turbulence is considered to be one of the most likely mechanisms to slow down the gravitational collapse in dense clumps, thereby enabling the formation of massive stars. However, several recent studies…
Supersonic turbulence is an essential element in understanding how structure within interstellar gas is created and shaped. In the context of star formation, many computational studies show that the mass spectrum of density and velocity…
Observations of magnetic field strengths imply that molecular cloud fragments are individually close to being in a magnetically critical state, even though both magnetic field and column density measurements range over two orders of…
We discuss the mechanism of cluster formation in hierarchically collapsing molecular clouds. Recent evidence, both observational and numerical, suggests that molecular clouds (MCs) may be undergoing global, hierarchical gravitational…
We investigate the formation of star clusters in an unbound GMC, where the supporting kinetic energy is twice as large as the cloud's self-gravity. This cloud manages to form a series of star clusters and disperse, all within roughly 2…
Radiation feedback from stellar clusters is expected to play a key role in setting the rate and efficiency of star formation in giant molecular clouds (GMCs). To investigate how radiation forces influence realistic turbulent systems, we…
Feedback from protostellar outflows can influence the nature of turbulence in star forming regions even if they are not the primary source of velocity dispersion for all scales of molecular clouds. For the rate and power expected in star…
We revisit the origin of Larson's scaling relations, which describe the structure and kinematics of molecular clouds, based on recent observations and large-scale simulations of supersonic turbulence. Using dimensional analysis, we first…
This review summarizes the argument for molecular clouds being dominated by turbulence, most likely super-Alfvenic turbulence. Five lines of observational evidence are given: molecular linewidths and line shapes, nonequilibrium chemical…
A large fraction of the gas in the Galaxy is cold, dense, and molecular. If all this gas collapsed under the influence of gravity and formed stars in a local free-fall time, the star formation rate in the Galaxy would exceed that observed…
High-mass stars form in protoclusters, where gravo-magnetic processes shape collapsing clouds and clumps to be elongated preferentially perpendicular to magnetic (B) fields. Yet it remains unclear whether gravo-magnetic processes still…
We examine how well the physical properties of clumps in turbulent molecular clouds can be determined by measurements of observed clump structures. We compare simulated observations of three-dimensional numerical models of isothermal,…
Recently, we have shown that if the ISM is governed by super-sonic turbulent flows, the excursion-set formalism can be used to calculate the statistics of self-gravitating objects over a wide range of scales. On the largest self-gravitating…
We investigate collisions between giant molecular clouds (GMCs) as potential generators of their internal turbulence. Using magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of self-gravitating, magnetized, turbulent, GMCs, we compare kinematic and…