Related papers: Unbound Star-forming Molecular Clouds
We apply gravity-based and density-based methods to identify clouds in numerical simulations of the star-forming, three-phase interstellar medium (ISM), and compare their properties and their global correlation with the star formation rate…
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,…
In this paper, we review some of the properties of dense molecular cloud cores. The results presented here rely on three-dimensional numerical simulations of isothermal, magnetized, turbulent, and self-gravitating molecular clouds (MCs) in…
We analyse extinction maps of nearby Giant Molecular Clouds to forge a link between driving processes of turbulence and modes of star formation. Our investigation focuses on cloud structure in the column density range above the self…
Clouds containing molecular dark matter in quantities relevant for star formation may exist in minihaloes of the type of cold dark matter included in many cosmological simulations or in the regions of some galaxies extending far beyond…
We revisit the problem of the star formation timescale and the ages of molecular clouds. The apparent overabundance of star-forming molecular clouds over clouds without active star formation has been thought to indicate that molecular…
We review the progress that has been made in observing and analyzing molecular cloud structure in recent years. Structures are self-similar over a wide range of scales with similar power law indices independent of the star forming nature 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…
The star-forming ability of a molecular cloud depends on the fraction of gas it can cycle into the dense-phase. Consequently, one of the crucial questions in reconciling star-formation in clouds is to understand the factors that control…
Molecular cloud observations show that clouds have non-thermal velocity dispersions that scale with the cloud size as $\sigma\propto R^{1/2}$ at constant surface density, and for varying surface density scale with both the cloud`s size and…
I describe the scenario of molecular cloud (MC) evolution that has emerged over the past decade or so. MCs can start out as cold atomic clouds formed by compressive motions in the warm neutral medium (WNM) of galaxies. Such motions can be…
We used CO (2-1) and CO (1-0) data cubes to identify molecular clouds and study their kinematics and dynamics in three nearby galaxies and the inner Milky Way. When observed at similar spatial and velocity resolutions, molecular clouds in…
In order to understand the origin of observed molecular cloud properties, it is critical to understand how clouds interact with their environments during their formation, growth, and collapse. It has been suggested that accretion-driven…
We test the hypothesis that the starless cores may be gravitationally bound clouds supported largely by thermal pressure by comparing observed molecular line spectra to theoretical spectra produced by a simulation that includes…
In this paper we investigate the level of star formation activity within nearby molecular clouds. We employ a uniform set of infrared extinction maps to provide accurate assessments of cloud mass and structure and compare these with…
We construct models of molecular clouds that are considered as ensembles of transient cores. Each core is assumed to develop in the background gas of the cloud, grow to high density and decay into the background. The chemistry in each core…
We compute the star formation rate (SFR) in molecular clouds (MCs) that originate {\it ab initio} in a new, higher-resolution simulation of supernova-driven turbulence. Because of the large number of well-resolved clouds with…
We present the results of a numerical simulation in which star formation proceeds from an initially unbound molecular cloud core. The turbulent motions, which dominate the dynamics, dissipate in shocks leaving a quiescent region which…
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…
In this study, we investigate the shapes of starless and protostellar cores using hydrodynamic, self-gravitating adaptive mesh refinement simulations of turbulent molecular clouds. We simulate observations of these cores in dust emission,…