Related papers: Why most molecular clouds are gravitationally domi…
Hydrodynamical simulations of turbulent molecular clouds show that star clusters form from the hierarchical merger of several sub-clumps. We run smoothed-particle hydrodynamics simulations of turbulence-supported molecular clouds with mass…
The influence of rotation and magnetic fields on the physical properties of isothermal gas clouds is discussed. The presence of rotation and/or magnetic fields results in an increase of the critical cloud mass with respect to gravitational…
We present an idealized, semi-empirical model for the evolution of gravitationally contracting molecular clouds (MCs) and their star formation rate (SFR) and efficiency (SFE). The model assumes that the instantaneous SFR is given by the…
A fundamental issue in star formation is understanding the precise mechanisms leading to the formation of prestellar cores, and their subsequent gravitationally unstable evolution. To address this question, we carefully construct a suite of…
Observed molecular clouds often appear to have very low star formation efficiencies and lifetimes an order of magnitude longer than their free-fall times. Their support is attributed to the random supersonic motions observed in them. We…
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,…
Understanding the dynamics of material objects advected by turbulent flows is a long standing question in fluid dynamics. In this perspective article we focus on the characterization of the statistical properties of non-interacting…
A stochastic model of fragmentation of molecular clouds has been developed for studying the resulting Initial Mass Function (IMF) where the number of fragments, inter-occurrence time of fragmentation, masses and velocities of the fragments…
We investigate the formation of GMCs in spiral galaxies through both agglomeration of clouds in the spiral arms, and self gravity. The simulations presented include two-fluid models, which contain both cold and warm gas, although there is…
We use the spherical collapse model to demonstrate that the observable average density of virialized clusters depends on the properties of dark energy along with the properties of gravity on cluster scales and can therefore be used as a…
The power spectrum of a homogeneous and isotropic stochastic variable, characterized by a finite correlation length, does in general not vanish on scales larger than the correlation scale. If the variable is a divergence free vector field,…
Supersonic random motions are observed in dark clouds and are traditionally interpreted as Alfven waves, but the possibility that these motions are super-Alfvenic has not been ruled out. In this work we report the results of numerical…
In order to investigate the origin of the interstellar turbulence, detailed observations in the CO J=1--0 and 3--2 lines have been carried out in an interacting region of a molecular cloud with an HII region. As a result, several 1,000 to…
We aim to better understand how the spatial structure of molecular clouds is governed by turbulence. For that, we study the large-scale spatial distribution of low density molecular gas and search for characteristic length scales. We employ…
Using a new physical model for star formation (Padoan 1995) we have tested the possibility that globular clusters (GCs) are formed from primordial mass fluctuations, whose mass scale ($10^8$ - $10^9$ M$_{\odot}$) is selected out of a CDM…
The giant, star forming clumps in gas-rich, high redshift disks are commonly assumed to form due to gravitational instabilities, in which protoclumps have a Toomre-$Q$ parameter less than unity. However, some cosmological simulations show…
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…
We investigate the properties of highly compressible turbulence, the compressibility arising from a small effective polytropic exponent $\gamma_e$ due to cooling. In the limit of small $\gamma_e$, the density jump at shocks is shown to be…
Some of the youngest stars (age $\lesssim 10$ Myr) are clustered, while many others are observed scattered throughout star forming regions or in complete isolation. It has been intensively debated whether the scattered or isolated stars…
The origin of non-thermal motions in massive star forming regions can be ascribed to turbulence acting against the gravitational collapse, or to the self-gravity itself driving the rapid global collapse. The dependence between velocity…