Related papers: Turbulence and galactic structure
We investigate turbulent gas motions in spiral galaxies and their importance to star formation in far outer disks, where the column density is typically far below the critical value for spontaneous gravitational collapse. Following the…
Young galaxies are clumpy, gas-rich, and highly turbulent. Star formation appears to occur by gravitational instabilities in galactic disks. The high dispersion makes the clumps massive and the disks thick. The star formation rate should be…
The Interstellar Medium (ISM) is a complex, multi-phase system, where the history of the stars occurs. The processes of birth and death of stars are strongly coupled to the dynamics of the ISM. The observed chaotic and diffusive motions of…
Two competing models, gravitational instability-driven transport and stellar feedback, have been proposed to interpret the high velocity dispersions observed in high-redshift galaxies. We study the major mechanisms to drive the turbulence…
Self-gravity and stellar feedback are capable of driving turbulence and transporting mass and angular momentum in disk galaxies, but the balance between them is not well understood. In the previous paper in this series, we showed that…
Context. Traditionally, supersonic turbulence is considered to be one of the most likely mechanisms to slow down the gravitational collapse in dense clumps, thereby enabling the formation of massive stars. However, several recent studies…
The origin and types of spiral arms are reviewed with an emphasis on the connections between these arms and star formation. Flocculent spiral arms are most likely the result of transient instabilities in the gas that promote dense cloud…
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…
The Schmidt-Kennicutt relation links the surface densities of gas to the star formation rate in galaxies. The physical origin of this relation, and in particular its break, i.e. the transition between an inefficient regime at low gas…
Turbulence plays a critical role in regulating star formation in molecular clouds and is also observed in simulations of primordial halos that host Population III (Pop III) stars. The relative velocity between baryons and dark matter at the…
Star formation is one of the least understood processes in cosmic evolution. It is difficult to formulate a general theory for star formation in part because of the wide range of physical processes involved. The interstellar gas out of…
Star formation in galaxies is inefficient, and understanding how star formation is regulated in galaxies is one of the most fundamental challenges of contemporary astrophysics. Radiative cooling, feedback from supernovae and active galactic…
Clusters of galaxies form through major merger and/or absorption of smaller groups. In fact, some characteristic structures such as cold fronts, which are likely relevant to moving substructures, are found by {\it Chandra}. It is expected…
We study the galactic-scale triggering of star formation. We find that the largest mass-scale not stabilized by rotation, a well defined quantity in a rotating system and with clear dynamical meaning, strongly correlates with the star…
In the multi-scale view of the star formation process the material flows from large molecular clouds down to clumps and cores. In this paradigm it is still unclear if it is gravity or turbulence that drives the observed supersonic…
We study how the interaction between the streaming instability and intrinsic gas-phase turbulence affects planetesimal formation via gravitational collapse in protoplanetary disks. Turbulence impedes the formation of particle clumps by…
(Abridged) The formation of molecular clouds (MCs) from the diffuse interstellar gas appears to be a necessary step for star formation, as young stars invariably occur within them. However, the mechanisms controlling the formation of MCs…
Star formation is inefficient. Recent advances in numerical simulations and theoretical models of molecular clouds show that the combined effects of interstellar turbulence, magnetic fields and stellar feedback can explain the low…
Dynamical evolution of spiral galaxies is strongly dependent on non-axisymmetric patterns that develop from gravitational instabilities, either spontaneously or externally triggered. Some evolutionary sequences are described through which a…
We investigate the gravitational instability of galactic discs, treating stars and cold interstellar gas as two distinct components, and taking into account the phenomenology of turbulence in the interstellar medium (ISM), i.e. the…