Related papers: Less wrong: a more realistic initial condition for…
Turbulence in the intracluster medium (ICM) is driven by active galactic nuclei (AGNs) jets, by mergers, and in the wakes of infalling galaxies. It not only governs gas motion but also plays a key role in the ICM thermodynamics. Turbulence…
Star clusters are known to be formed in turbulent molecular clouds. How turbulence is driven in molecular clouds and what effect this has on star formation is still unclear. We compare a simulation setup with turbulent driving everywhere in…
We study the dynamics of phase transitions in the interstellar medium by means of three-dimensional hydrodynamic numerical simulations. We use a realistic cooling function and generic nonequilibrium initial conditions to follow the…
All stars are born in molecular clouds, and most in giant molecular clouds (GMCs), which thus set the star formation activity of galaxies. We first review their observed properties, including measures of mass surface density, Sigma, and…
Radiation feedback from young star clusters embedded in giant molecular clouds (GMCs) is believed to be important to the control of star formation. For the most massive and dense clouds, including those in which super star clusters (SSCs)…
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…
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 conduct simulations of $\sim$kpc-scale cool clouds in the circumgalactic medium (CGM), using initial conditions sampled from a highly resolved cosmological magneto-hydrodynamical zoom-in of a Milky Way-like galaxy. We select ten distinct…
A roughly constant temperature over a wide range of densities is maintained in molecular clouds through radiative heating and cooling. An isothermal equation of state is therefore frequently employed in molecular cloud simulations. However,…
Feedback from protostellar outflows can influence the nature of turbulence in star forming regions even if they are not the primary source of velocity dispersion for all scales of molecular clouds. For the rate and power expected in star…
Dense, star-forming gas is believed to form at the stagnation points of large-scale ISM flows, but observational examples of this process in action are rare. We here present a giant molecular cloud (GMC) sandwiched between two colliding…
We investigate the formation and evolution of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in a Milky-Way-like disk galaxy with a flat rotation curve. We perform a series of 3D adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) numerical simulations that follow both the…
To date, most numerical simulations of molecular clouds, and star formation within them, assume a uniform density sphere or box with an imposed turbulent velocity field. In this work, we select molecular clouds from galactic scale…
Interstellar gas clouds are often both highly magnetized and supersonically turbulent, with velocity dispersions set by a competition between driving and dissipation. This balance has been studied extensively in the context of gases with…
Turbulence in the interstellar medium (ISM) is crucial in the process of star formation. Shocks produced by supernova explosions, jets, radiation from massive stars, or galactic spiral-arm dynamics are amongst the most common drivers of…
We present numerical simulations of the passage of clumpy gas through a galactic spiral shock and the subsequent formation of giant molecular clouds (GMCs). The spiral shock forms dense clouds while dissipating kinetic energy, producing…
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 discuss the role of turbulence in cloud and star formation, as observed in numerical simulations of the interstellar medium. Turbulent compression at the interfaces of colliding gas streams is responsible for the formation of…
We present a semi-analytic model for the interstellar medium that considers local processes and structures of turbulent star-forming gas. A volume element of the interstellar medium is described as a multiphase system, comprising a cold and…
Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs) are observed to be turbulent, but theory shows that without a driving mechanism turbulence should quickly decay. The question arises by which mechanisms turbulence is driven or sustained. It has been shown that…