Related papers: Gravity or turbulence? II. Evolving column density…
We obtain an equation for the density profile in a self-gravitating polytropic spherically symmetric turbulent fluid with an equation of state $p_{\rm gas}\propto \rho^\Gamma$. This is done in the framework of ensembles of molecular clouds…
Molecular dynamics studies of nono-sized rigid grains, droplets and bubbles in nano-sized pores indicate that the drag force may have a hydrodynamic form if the moving object is dense and small compared to the pore diameter. Otherwise, the…
The rotation dynamics of spiral galaxies is modeled using a sum of two mass distributions: a spherical bulge and a thin disk. The density functions representing these mass distributions are calculated from the total angular momentum of the…
Observations reveal that mature spiral galaxies consist of stars, gases and plasma approximately distributed in a thin disk of circular shape, usually with a central bulge. The rotation velocities quickly increase from the galactic center…
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 introduce a model for the large-scale, global 3D structure of molecular clouds. Motivated by the morphological appearance of clouds in surface density maps, we model clouds as cylinders, with the aim of backing out information about the…
Density probability distribution functions (PDFs) for turbulent self-gravitating clouds should be convolutions of the local log-normal PDF, which depends on the local average density rho-ave and Mach number M, and the probability…
The propagation of high-energy cosmic rays through giant molecular clouds constitutes a fundamental process in astronomy and astrophysics. The diffusion of cosmic-rays through these magnetically turbulent environments is often studied…
During the last two decades, the focus of star formation research has shifted from understanding the collapse of a single dense core into a star to studying the formation hundreds to thousands of stars in molecular clouds. In this chapter,…
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…
Using self-consistent magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations, we explore the hypothesis that nonlinear MHD waves dominate the internal dynamics of galactic molecular clouds. We employ an isothermal equation of state and allow for…
The main observational evidence for turbulence in the interstellar medium (ISM) and molecular clouds is the power-law energy spectrum for velocity fluctuations, E(k) \propto k^{\alpha}. The Kolmogorov scaling exponent, \alpha=-5/3, is…
We characterize the column density probability distributions functions (PDFs) of the atomic hydrogen gas, HI, associated with seven Galactic molecular clouds (MCs). We use 21 cm observations from the Leiden/Argentine/Bonn Galactic HI Survey…
The classical picture of a star-forming filament is a near-equilibrium structure, with collapse dependent on its gravitational criticality. Recent observations have complicated this picture, revealing filaments as a mess of apparently…
Molecular clouds are observed to be turbulent, but the origin of this turbulence is not well understood. As a result, there are two different approaches to simulating molecular clouds, one in which the turbulence is allowed to decay after…
We present a far-IR survey of the entire Mon R2 GMC with $Herschel-SPIRE$ cross-calibrated with $Planck-HFI$ data. We fit the SEDs of each pixel with a greybody function and an optimal beta value of 1.8. We find that mid-range column…
Turbulent mixing and entrainment at the boundary of a cloud is studied by means of direct numerical simulations that couple the Eulerian description of the turbulent velocity and water vapor fields with a Lagrangian ensemble of cloud water…
We use numerical simulations to study the effect of nonlinear MHD waves in a stratified, self-gravitating molecular cloud that is bounded by a hot and tenuous external medium. In a previous paper, we had shown the details of a standard…
We revisit the mass-size relation of molecular cloud structures based on the column density map of the Cygnus-X molecular cloud complex. We extract 135 column density peaks in Cygnus-X and analyze the column density distributions around…
We study the evolution of simulated disk galaxies in the context of a nonlocal theory of gravity. In this theory the appearance of the dark matter problem in cosmology and astrophysics is a manifestation of the nonlocality of the…