Related papers: Molecular Shattering
We present numerical investigations into the formation of massive stars from centrally condensed turbulent cores. The results of five hydrodynamical simulations are described, following the collapse of the core, fragmentation and the…
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…
We model molecular cloud fragmentation with thin disk non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic simulations that include ambipolar diffusion and partial ionization that transitions from primarily ultraviolet dominated to cosmic ray dominated regimes.…
The outskirts of galaxies offer extreme environments where we can test our understanding of the formation, evolution, and destruction of molecules and their relationship with star formation and galaxy evolution. We review the basic…
Turbulent mixing and entrainment at the boundary of a cloud is studied by means of direct numerical simulations that couple the Eulerian description of the turbulent velocity and water vapor fields with a Lagrangian ensemble of cloud water…
Supersonic turbulence in molecular clouds is a dominant agent that strongly affects the clouds' evolution and star formation activity. Turbulence may be initiated and maintained by a number of processes, acting at a wide range of physical…
A method for following fragmentation simulations further in time using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is presented. In a normal SPH simulation of the collapse and fragmentation of a molecular cloud, high-density regions of gas that…
Two dimensional compressible magneto-hydrodynamical (MHD) simulations run for 20 crossing times on a 800x640 grid with two stable thermal states show persistent hierarchical density structures and Kolmogorov turbulent motions in the…
The existence of fast moving, cold gas ubiquitously observed in galactic winds is theoretically puzzling, since the destruction time of cold gas is much smaller than its acceleration time. In previous work, we showed that cold gas can…
How molecular clouds fragment and create the dense structures which go on to form stars is an open question. We investigate the relative importance of different energy terms (kinetic, thermal, magnetic, and gravity - both self-gravity and…
We present an analysis of the large-scale molecular cloud structure and of the stability of clumpy structures in nearby molecular clouds. In our recent work, we identified a structural transition in molecular clouds by studying the…
The propagation of a shock wave into an interstellar medium is investigated by two-dimensional numerical hydrodynamic calculation with cooling, heating and thermal conduction. We present results of the high-resolution two-dimensional…
(Abridged) The thermal history of the intracluster medium (ICM) is complex. Heat input from cluster mergers, AGN, and galaxy winds offsets and may even halt the cooling of the ICM. Consequently, the processes that set the properties of the…
Circumgalactic gas around massive galaxies generally has a volume-filling component -- an atmosphere -- with a temperature determined by the potential-well depth of the galaxy's halo. If the atmosphere is near hydrostatic equilibrium and is…
The hot intracluster medium (ICM) is thought to be quiescent with low observed velocity dispersions. Surface brightness fluctuations of the ICM also suggest that its turbulence is subsonic with a Kolmogorov scaling relation, indicating that…
Absorption-line measurements of the circumgalactic medium (CGM) display a highly non-uniform distribution of lower ionization state species accompanied by more widespread higher ionization state material. This suggests that the CGM is a…
We perform numerical magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of the gravitational collapse and fragmentation of a cylindrical molecular cloud with the help of the FLASH code. The cloud collapses rapidly along its radius without any signs of…
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…
Feedback is indispensable in galaxy formation. However, lacking resolutions, cosmological simulations often use ad hoc feedback parameters. Conversely, small-box simulations, while better resolving the feedback, cannot capture gas evolution…
Thermal instability in the circum-galactic medium (CGM) can be responsible for the existence of cold clouds (e.g., high-velocity clouds) embedded in a hot diffuse medium (e.g., X-ray emitting gas). While many previous studies have analyzed…