Related papers: Constructing multi-scale gravitational energy spec…
We analyze the physical properties and energy balance of density enhancements in two SPH simulations of the formation, evolution, and collapse of giant molecular clouds. In the simulations, no feedback is included, so all motions are due…
Recent observational evidence that magnetic fields are dynamically important in molecular clouds, compared to self-gravity and turbulence, is reviewed and illustrated with data from the NGC 2024 region. One piece of evidence, turbulence…
Despite over 30 years of study, the mass-area relationship within and among clouds is still poorly understood both observationally and theoretically. Modern extinction datasets should have sufficient resolution and dynamic range to…
We present synthetic Hi and CO observations of a simulation of decaying turbulence in the thermally bistable neutral medium. We first present the simulation, with clouds initially consisting of clustered clumps. Self-gravity causes these…
The numerical experiments of turbulence conducted by Gotoh et al. are analyzed precisely with the help of the formulae for the scaling exponents of velocity structure function and for the probability density function (PDF) of velocity…
We discuss star formation in the turbulent interstellar medium. We argue that morphological appearance and dynamical evolution of the gas is primarily determined by supersonic turbulence, and that stars form via a process we call…
The mass and size distributions are the key characteristics of any astrophysical objects, including the densest clumps comprising the cold phase of multiphase environments. In our recent papers, we showed how individual clouds of various…
Characterizing turbulence in protoplanetary disks is crucial for understanding how they accrete and spawn planets. Recent measurements of spectral line broadening promise to diagnose turbulence, with different lines probing different…
We have designed a simple multi-scale method that identifies turbulent motions in hydrodynamical grid simulations. The method does not assmume ant a-priori coherence scale to distinguish laminar and turbulent flows. Instead, the local mean…
We summarize recent numerical results on the control of the star formation efficiency (SFE), addressing the effects of turbulence and the magnetic field strength. In closed-box numerical simulations, the effect of the turbulent Mach number…
We simulate fragmentation and gravitational collapse of cold, magnetized molecular clouds. We explore the nonlinear development of an instability mediated by ambipolar diffusion, in which the collapse rate is intermediate to fast…
We present a statistical analysis of the gravoturbulent velocity fluctuations in molecular cloud complexes extracted from our "Cloud Factory" galactic-scale ISM simulation suite. For this purpose, we produce non-LTE $^{12}$CO J=1-0…
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…
We conduct numerical experiments in which we systematically vary the initial density over four orders of magnitude and the turbulent velocity over a factor ten. In a companion paper, we investigate the dependence of this distribution on the…
The scattering of inertia-gravity waves by large-scale geostrophic turbulence in a rapidly rotating, strongly stratified fluid leads to the diffusion of wave energy on the constant-frequency cone in wavenumber space. We derive the…
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,…
Though flux freezing is a good approximation frequently assumed for molecular clouds, ambipolar diffusion (AD) is inevitable at certain scales. The scale at which AD sets in can be a crucial parameter for turbulence and the star formation…
We study the effect of density fluctuations induced by turbulence on the HI/H$_2$ structure in photodissociation regions (PDRs) both analytically and numerically. We perform magnetohydrodynamic numerical simulations for both subsonic and…
Recent models of molecular cloud formation and evolution suggest that such clouds are dynamic and generally exhibit gravitational collapse. We present a simple analytic model of global collapse onto a filament and compare this with our…
We investigate the behavior of energy fluctuations in several models of granular gases maintained in a non-equilibrium steady state. In the case of a gas heated from a boundary, the inhomogeneities of the system play a predominant role.…