Related papers: A Model of Cloud Fragmentation
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 discuss the production of gravity waves from the fragmentation of a supersymmetric condensate in the early universe. Supersymmetry predicts the existence of flat directions in the potential. At the end of inflation, the scalar fields…
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 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…
Simulations from the scales of isolated galaxies to clouds have been instrumental in informing us about molecular cloud formation and evolution. Simulations are able to investigate the roles of gravity, feedback, turbulence, heating and…
Molecular clouds have complex density structures produced by processes including turbulence and gravity. We propose a triangulation-based method to dissect the density structure of a molecular cloud and study the interactions between dense…
Properties of candidate stars, forming out of molecular clouds, depend on the ambient conditions of the parent cloud. We present a series of 2D and 3D simulations of fragmentation of molecular clouds in starburst regions as well as clouds…
Stars 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 and most massive…
Inertial particles advected in chaotic flows often accumulate in strange attractors. While moving in these fractal sets they usually approach each other and collide. Here we consider inertial particles aggregating upon collision. The new…
We suggest that molecular cloud (MC) turbulence is a consequence of the very process of MC formation by collisions of larger-scale flows in the diffuse atomic gas, which generate turbulence in the accumulated gas through bending- mode…
Magnetic fields are dynamically important in the diffuse interstellar medium. Understanding how gravitationally bound, star-forming clouds form requires modeling of the fields in a self-consistent, supernova-driven, turbulent, magnetized,…
I present an overview of the hierarchy of structures existing in the interstellar medium (ISM) and the possible mechanisms that cause the fragmentation of one level into the next, with the formation of stars as its last step. Within this…
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…
We investigate the origin of the observed scaling $j\sim R^{3/2}$ between the specific angular momentum $j$ and the radius $R$ of molecular clouds (MCs) and their their substructures, and of the observed near independence of $\beta$, the…
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 a parameter survey of fragmentation in collapsar disks, using a revised version of the Chen & Beloborodov (2007) model that determines the structure of steady state hyperaccretion disks in a general relativistic and neutrino…
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…
We measure the mass and size of cloud fragments in several molecular clouds continuously over a wide range of spatial scales (0.05 < r / pc < 3). Based on the recently developed "dendrogram-technique", this characterizes dense cores as well…
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…
In order to understand the origin of observed molecular cloud properties, it is critical to understand how clouds interact with their environments during their formation, growth, and collapse. It has been suggested that accretion-driven…