Related papers: G-virial: Gravity-based structure analysis of mole…
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…
The physical properties of molecular clouds are often measured using spectral-line observations, which provide the only probes of the clouds' velocity structure. It is hard, though, to assess whether and to what extent intensity features in…
Since molecular clouds form stars, at least some parts of them must be in a state of collapse. However, there is a long-standing debate as to whether that collapse is local, involving only a small fraction of the cloud mass, or global, with…
In the first article of this series, we have used the ergodic theory to assess the validity of a statistical approach to characterize various properties of star-forming molecular clouds (MCs) from a limited number of observations or…
We generalize the classic Bonnor-Ebert stability analysis of pressure-truncated, self-gravitating gas spheres, to include clouds with arbitrary equations of state. A virial-theorem analysis is also used to incorporate mean magnetic fields…
Gravity plays important roles in the evolution of molecular clouds. We present an acceleration mapping method to estimate the acceleration induced by gravitational interactions in molecular clouds based on observational data. We find that…
We discuss the virial balance of all members of a cloud ensemble in numerical simulations of self-gravitating MHD turbulence. We first discuss the choice of reference frame for evaluating the terms entering the virial theorem (VT),…
As both simulations and observations reach the resolution of the star-forming molecular clouds, it becomes important to clarify if these two techniques are discussing the same objects in galaxies. We compare clouds formed in a high…
The structure and star formation activity of a molecular cloud are fundamentally linked to its internal turbulence. However, accurately measuring the turbulent velocity dispersion is challenging due to projection effects and observational…
Tests of gravity at the galaxy scale are in their infancy. As a first step to systematically uncovering the gravitational significance of galaxies, we map three fundamental gravitational variables -- the Newtonian potential, acceleration…
We investigate the role of tidal forces in molecular cloud formation by examining how apparent boundedness, as diagnosed by the classical virial parameter, relates to the actual gravitational state of clouds subject to tidal forces from…
In this work, we investigate the observational and algorithmic effects on molecular cloud samples identified from position-position-velocity (PPV) space. By smoothing and cutting off the high quality data of the Milky Way Imaging Scroll…
Atmospheric gravity waves occur in the Earths atmosphere caused by an interplay between gravity and buoyancy forces. These waves have profound impacts on various aspects of the atmosphere, including the patterns of precipitation, cloud…
Gravity plays a determining role in the evolution of the molecular ISM. In \citet{2016arXiv160304342L}, we proposed a measure called gravitational energy spectrum to quantify the importance of gravity on multiple physical scales. In this…
We leverage the 1 pc spatial resolution of the Leike et al. 2020 3D dust map to characterize the three-dimensional structure of nearby molecular clouds ($d \lesssim 400$ pc). We start by "skeletonizing" the clouds in 3D volume density space…
Hub-filament systems are suggested to be the birth cradles of high-mass stars and clusters. We apply the FILFINDER algorithm to the integrated intensity maps of the 13CO (3-2) line to identify filaments in the G333 complex, and extract the…
(Abridged) We derive an analytical formula which provides estimates on multiscale gravitational energy distribution using the observed surface density PDF. Our analytical formalism also enables one to convert the observed column density PDF…
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…
Point cloud compression plays a crucial role in reducing the huge cost of data storage and transmission. However, distortions can be introduced into the decompressed point clouds due to quantization. In this paper, we propose a novel…
Gravity is the driving force of star formation. Although gravity is caused by the presence of matter, its role in complex regions is still unsettled. One effective way to study the pattern of gravity is to compute the accretion it exerts on…