Related papers: Developing Diagnostics of Molecular Clouds Using N…
The weak collisionality typical of turbulence in many diffuse astrophysical plasmas invalidates an MHD description of the turbulent dynamics, motivating the development of a more comprehensive theory of kinetic turbulence. In particular, a…
The objective of this work is to understand how the characteristics of relativistic MHD turbulence may differ from those of nonrelativistic MHD turbulence. We accomplish this by studying the ideal invariants in the relativistic case and…
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,…
Molecular clouds are a fundamental ingredient of galaxies: they are the channels that transform the diffuse gas into stars. The detailed process of how they do it is not completely understood. We review the current knowledge of molecular…
Constraining the physical and chemical evolution of molecular clouds is essential to our understanding of star formation. These investigations often necessitate knowledge of some local representative number density of the gas along the line…
We review progress in the development of physically realistic three dimensional simulated models of the galaxy.We consider the scales from star forming molecular clouds to the full spiral disc. Models are computed using hydrodynamic (HD) or…
The formation of stars occurs in the dense molecular cloud phase of the interstellar medium. Observations and numerical simulations of molecular clouds have shown that supersonic magnetised turbulence plays a key role for the formation of…
Emergent phenomena share the fascinating property of not being obvious consequences of the design of the system in which they appear. This characteristic is no less relevant when attempting to simulate such phenomena, given that the outcome…
Molecular dynamics simulations are an important tool for describing the evolution of a chemical system with time. However, these simulations are inherently held back either by the prohibitive cost of accurate electronic structure theory…
Recent progress in the understanding of star formation is summarized. A consistent picture is emerging where molecular clouds form with turbulent velocity fields and clumpy substructure, imprinted already during their formation. The clouds…
Star formation is intimately linked to the dynamical evolution of molecular clouds. Turbulent fragmentation determines where and when protostellar cores form, and how they contract and grow in mass via accretion from the surrounding cloud…
The classical picture of a star-forming filament is a near-equilibrium structure, with collapse dependent on its gravitational criticality. Recent observations have complicated this picture, revealing filaments as a mess of apparently…
Molecular clouds are essentially made up of atomic and molecular hydrogen, which in spite of being the simplest molecule in the ISM plays a key role in the chemical evolution of molecular clouds. Since its formation time is very long, the…
Molecular clouds (MC) are structures of dense gas in the interstellar medium (ISM), that extend from ten to a few hundred parsecs and form the main gas reservoir available for star formation. Hydrodynamical simulations of varying complexity…
We explore whether observed molecular clouds could include a substantial population of unbound clouds. Using simulations which include only turbulence and gravity, we are able to match observed relations and naturally reproduce the observed…
We analyse extinction maps of nearby Giant Molecular Clouds to forge a link between driving processes of turbulence and modes of star formation. Our investigation focuses on cloud structure in the column density range above the self…
We analyze hydrodynamic simulations of turbulent, star-forming molecular clouds that are post-processed with the photo-dissociation region astrochemistry code 3D-PDR. We investigate the sensitivity of 15 commonly applied turbulence…
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,…
We discuss constraints on the rates of stirring and dissipation of MHD turbulence in molecular clouds. Recent MHD simulations suggest that turbulence in clouds decays rapidly, thus providing a significant source of energy input,…
Numerical MHD codes have become extraordinarily powerful tools with which to study accretion turbulence. They have been used primarily to extract values for the classical $\alpha$ parameter, and to follow complex evolutionary development.…