Related papers: Unbound Star-forming Molecular Clouds
The virial ratio between kinetic and gravitational terms provides key insight into the balance of forces that confine a molecular cloud, but the clumpy and filamentary structures of resolved clouds make it difficult to evaluate this ratio…
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…
Recent galaxy observations show that star formation activity changes depending on galactic environments. In order to understand the diversity of galactic-scale star formation, it is crucial to understand the formation and evolution of giant…
The asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) towards several nearby galaxies detected by Planck data is probably due to the rotation of "cold gas" clouds present in the galactic halos. In 1995 it had been proposed that galactic…
In the standard picture of isolated star formation, dense ``starless'' cores are formed out of magnetic molecular clouds due to ambipolar diffusion. Under the simplest spherical geometry, I demonstrate that ``starless'' cores formed this…
We construct a model by integrating observational constraints from the Milky Way and nearby galaxies to predict cloud-scale star formation rates (SFRs). In the model, we first estimate the initial total mass of clumps in a cloud based on…
The cloud-scale physics of star formation and feedback represent the main uncertainty in galaxy formation studies. Progress is hampered by the limited empirical constraints outside the restricted environment of the Local Group. In…
We carry out three-dimensional MHD simulations of star formation in turbulent, magnetized clouds, including ambipolar diffusion and feedback from protostellar outflows. The calculations focus on relatively diffuse clouds threaded by a…
We use numerical simulations of molecular cloud formation in the colliding flow scenario to investigate the reliability of observational estimates of the angular momenta of early-state, low-mass protostellar cores. We show that, with…
Momentum deposition by radiation pressure from young, massive stars may help to destroy molecular clouds and unbind stellar clusters by driving large-scale outflows. We extend our previous numerical radiation hydrodynamic study of…
We compare the properties of clouds in simulated M33 galaxies to those observed in the real M33. We apply a friends of friends algorithm and CPROPS to identify clouds, as well as a pixel by pixel analysis. We obtain very good agreement…
Following an approach initially outlined by McKee & Holliman, we investigate the structure and stability of dense, starless molecular cloud cores. We model those as spherical clouds in hydrostatic equilibrium and supported against gravity…
We study the instantaneous virial balance of clumps and cores (CCs) in 3D simulations of driven, MHD, isothermal molecular clouds (MCs). The models represent a range of magnetic field strengths in MCs from subcritical to non-magnetic…
We investigate general aspects of molecular line formation under conditions which are typical of prestellar cores. Focusing on simple linear molecules, we study formation of their rotational lines by radiative transfer simulations. We…
We simulate the formation of molecular clouds in colliding flows of warm neutral medium with the adaptive mesh refinement code {\sc Flash}. We include a chemical network to treat heating and cooling and to follow the formation of molecular…
Recent observations of molecular clouds around rich massive star clusters including NGC3603, Westerlund 2, and M20 revealed that the formation of massive stars could be triggered by a cloud-cloud collision. By using three-dimensional,…
How does turbulence contribute to the formation and structure of the dense interstellar medium (ISM)? Molecular clouds are dense, high-pressure objects. It is usually argued that gravitational confinement causes the high pressures, and that…
We use detailed numerical simulations of the coupled chemical, thermal and dynamical evolution of the gas in a turbulent molecular cloud to study the usefulness of the [CI] 609 micron and 370 micron fine structure emission lines as tracers…
Low-mass stars are generally understood to form by the gravitational collapse of the dense molecular clouds known as starless cores. Continuum observations have not been able to distinguish among the several different hypotheses that…
We investigate the intrinsic shapes of starless cores in the Orion GMC, using the prestellar core sample of Nutter and Ward-Thompson (2007), which is based on submillimeter SCUBA data. We employ a maximum-likelihood method to reconstruct…