Related papers: Molecular Cloud Turbulence and Star Formation
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…
We investigate numerically the combined effects of supersonic turbulence, strong magnetic fields and ambipolar diffusion on cloud evolution leading to star formation. We find that, in clouds that are initially magnetically subcritical,…
We review current understanding of star formation, outlining an overall theoretical framework and the observations that motivate it. A conception of star formation has emerged in which turbulence plays a dual role, both creating…
It has been known for more than 30 years that star formation in giant molecular clouds (GMCs) is slow, in the sense that only ~1% of the gas forms stars every free-fall time. This result is entirely independent of any particular model of…
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…
We use a suite of 3D simulations of star-forming molecular clouds, with and without stellar feedback, magnetic fields, and driven turbulence, to study the compression and expansion rates of the gas as functions of density. We show that,…
The formation of stars is inextricably linked to the structure of their parental molecular clouds. Here we take a number of nearby giant molecular clouds (GMCs) and analyse their column density and mass distributions. This investigation is…
We investigate the formation of stars within giant molecular clouds (GMCs) evolving in environments of different global magnetic field strength and large-scale dynamics. Building upon a series of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of…
We investigate the formation and evolution of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) by the collision of convergent warm neutral medium (WNM) streams in the interstellar medium, in the presence of magnetic fields and ambipolar diffusion (AD),…
We discuss HD and MHD compressible turbulence as a cloud-forming and cloud-structuring mechanism in the ISM. Results from a numerical model of the turbulent ISM at large scales suggest that the phase-like appearance of the medium, the…
A fraction of the dense cores within a turbulent molecular cloud will eventually collapse to form stars. Identifying the physical criteria for instability and analyzing critical core properties is therefore necessary to star formation…
Star formation is primarily controlled by the interplay between gravity, turbulence, and magnetic fields. However, the turbulence and magnetic fields in molecular clouds near the Galactic Center may differ substantially from spiral-arm…
Star formation is inefficient. Only a few percent of the available gas in molecular clouds forms stars, leading to the observed low star formation rate (SFR). The same holds when averaged over many molecular clouds, such that the SFR of…
Recent studies seem to suggest that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) in early-type galaxies might be different from a classical Kroupa or Chabrier IMF, i.e. contain a larger fraction of the total mass in low-mass stars. From a…
We study giant molecular cloud (GMC) collisions and their ability to trigger star cluster formation. We further develop our three dimensional magnetized, turbulent, colliding GMC simulations by implementing star formation sub-grid models.…
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…
The nature of turbulence in molecular clouds is one of the key parameters that control star formation efficiency: compressive motions, as opposed to solenoidal motions, can trigger the collapse of cores, or mark the expansion of Hii…
Using 3D MHD simulation with the effects of radiative cooling/heating, chemical reactions, and thermal conduction, we investigate the formation of molecular cloud in the ISM. We consider the formation of molecular cloud by accretion of the…
We aim to better understand how the spatial structure of molecular clouds is governed by turbulence. For that, we study the large-scale spatial distribution of low density molecular gas and search for characteristic length scales. We employ…
Recent observations of molecular clouds around rich massive star clusters including NGC3603, Westerlund 2, and M20 revealed that the formation of massive stars could be triggered by a cloud-cloud collision. By using three-dimensional,…