Related papers: The structure of self-gravitating clouds
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…
The Delta-variance analysis is an efficient tool for measuring the structural scaling behaviour of interstellar turbulence in astronomical maps. In paper I we proposed essential improvements to the Delta-variance analysis. In this paper we…
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…
Modeling the structure of molecular clouds depends on good methods to statistically compare simulations with observations in order to constrain the models. Here we characterize a suite of hydrodynamical and magnetohydrodynamical (MHD)…
[abridged] We investigate the velocity structure of protostellar cores that result from non-magnetic numerical models of the gravoturbulent fragmentation of molecular cloud material. A large fraction of the cores analyzed are ``quiescent'',…
We study the observable signatures of self-gravitating MHD turbulence by applying the probability density functions (PDFs) and the spatial density power spectrum to synthetic column density maps. We find that there exists three…
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…
Super-sonic turbulence fragments molecular clouds (MC) into a very complex density field with density contrasts of several orders of magnitude. A fraction of the gas is locked into dense and gravitationally bound cores, which collapse as…
Turbulent fragmentation determines where and when protostellar cores form, and how they contract and grow in mass from the surrounding cloud material. This process is investigated, using numerical models of self-gravitating molecular cloud…
We examine the idea that diffuse and giant molecular clouds and their substructure form as density fluctuations induced by large scale interstellar turbulence. We do this by investigating the topology of various fields in realistic…
We present numerical evidence of dynamic star formation in which the accreted stellar mass grows superlinearly with time, roughly as $t^2$. We perform simulations of star formation in self-gravitating hydrodynamic and magneto-hydrodynamic…
Turbulence governs the fragmentation of molecular clouds and plays a pivotal role in star formation. The persistence of observed cloud turbulence suggests it does not decay significantly within the turnover timescale, implying a recurrent…
We model gravitational collapse leading to star formation in a wide range of isolated disk galaxies using a three-dimensional, smoothed particle hydrodynamics code. The model galaxies include a dark matter halo and a disk of stars and…
(Abridged) We present a series of decaying turbulence simulations that represent a cluster-forming clump within a molecular cloud, investigating the role of magnetic fields on the formation of potential star-forming cores. We present an…
The observed rapid onset of star formation in molecular clouds requires rapid formation of dense fragments which can collapse individually before being overtaken by global gravitationally-driven flows. Many previous investigations have…
Stars and star clusters form by gravoturbulent fragmentation of interstellar gas clouds. The supersonic turbulence ubiquitously observed in Galactic molecular gas generates strong density fluctuations with gravity taking over in the densest…
We study the gravitational collapse in modified gravitational theories. In particular, we analyze a general $f(R)$ model with uniformly collapsing cloud of self-gravitating dust particles. This analysis shares analogies with the formation…
We review the progress that has been made in observing and analyzing molecular cloud structure in recent years. Structures are self-similar over a wide range of scales with similar power law indices independent of the star forming nature of…
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,…
We study the formation of giant dense cloud complexes and of stars within them by means of SPH numerical simulations of the mildly supersonic collision of gas streams (``inflows'') in the warm neutral medium (WNM). The resulting…