Related papers: Molecular Cloud Turbulence and Star Formation
Recent observations of molecular clouds show that dense filaments are the sites of present-day star formation. Thus, it is necessary to understand the filament formation process because these filaments provide the initial condition for star…
It is speculated that the high star-formation efficiency observed in spiral-arm molecular clouds is linked to the prevalence of compressive (curl-free) turbulent modes, while the shear-driven solenoidal (divergence-free) modes appear to be…
We investigate the properties of "star forming regions" in a previously published numerical simulation of molecular cloud formation out of compressive motions in the warm neutral atomic interstellar medium, neglecting magnetic fields and…
Turbulence in the interstellar medium (ISM) is crucial in the process of star formation. Shocks produced by supernova explosions, jets, radiation from massive stars, or galactic spiral-arm dynamics are amongst the most common drivers of…
In this work, we derive the stellar initial mass function (IMF) from the superposition of mass distributions of dense cores, generated through gravoturbulent fragmentation of unstable clumps in molecular clouds (MCs) and growing through…
In this study we investigate the formation and properties of prestellar and protostellar cores using hydrodynamic, self-gravitating Adaptive Mesh Refinement simulations, comparing the cases where turbulence is continually driven and where…
Truncated abstract: The formation of a protostellar disc is a natural outcome during the star formation process. As gas in a molecular cloud core collapses under self-gravity, the angular momentum of the gas will slow its collapse on small…
Most stars in the Galaxy are believed to be formed within star clusters from collapsing molecular clouds. However, the complete process of star formation, from the parent cloud to a gas-free star cluster, is still poorly understood. We…
Observations have not yielded convincing results concerning the form of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) or its variations in space and time, so it is proposed that theoretical models may provide useful guidance. Several classes of…
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…
Context. Molecular clouds are known to be turbulent and strongly affected by stellar feedback. Moreover, stellar feedback is believed to drive turbulence at large scales in galaxies. Aims. We study the role played by supernovae in molecular…
(Abridged) We explore, by means of a large ensemble of SPH simulations, how the level of turbulence affects the collapse and fragmentation of a star-forming core. All our simulated cores have the same, except that we vary (a) the initial…
Copious star formation occurs in the dense Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) of our Galaxy, but at a much smaller rate than occurs in a comparable mass of molecular gas in the Galactic disk. The combination of large turbulent velocity…
We systematically investigate how cloud-cloud collisions influence star formation, emphasizing the roles of collision velocity, magnetic field orientation, and radiative feedback. Using the first cloud-cloud collision simulations that model…
We investigate the formation of circumstellar disks and outflows subsequent to the collapse of molecular cloud cores with the magnetic field and turbulence. Numerical simulations are performed by using an adaptive mesh refinement to follow…
We study numerically the formation of molecular clouds in large-scale colliding flows including self-gravity. The models emphasize the competition between the effects of gravity on global and local scales in an isolated cloud. Global…
Turbulence in the intracluster medium (ICM) is driven by active galactic nuclei (AGNs) jets, by mergers, and in the wakes of infalling galaxies. It not only governs gas motion but also plays a key role in the ICM thermodynamics. Turbulence…
Dynamical collapses of magnetized molecular cloud cores are studied with magnetohydrodynamical simulations from the run-away collapse phase to the accretion phase. In the run-away collapse phase, a disk threaded by magnetic field lines is…
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…
Contemporary galactic star formation occurs predominantly within gravitationally unstable, cold, dense molecular gas within supersonic, turbulent, magnetized giant molecular clouds (GMCs). Significantly, because the chemical evolution…