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Related papers: Molecular Cloud Turbulence and Star Formation

200 papers

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…

Turbulence is a critical ingredient for star formation, yet its role for the initial mass function (IMF) is not fully understood. Here we perform magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) simulations of star cluster formation including gravity,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-12-07 Sajay Sunny Mathew , Christoph Federrath , Amit Seta

Molecular clouds in the central molecular zone (CMZ) have been observed to feature turbulent line widths that are significantly higher, and scale with cloud size more steeply, than in the rest of the Milky Way. In the same Galactic region,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-05-25 Konstantinos Tassis , Vasiliki Pavlidou

We use magnetohydrodynamical simulations of converging flows to investigate the process of molecular cloud formation and evolution out of the magnetised ISM. Here, we investigate whether the observed subcritical HI clouds can become…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-02 Bastian Körtgen , Robi Banerjee

Understanding the processes that determine the stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF) is a critical unsolved problem, with profound implications for many areas of astrophysics. In molecular clouds, stars are formed in cores, gas condensations…

Molecular clouds have broad linewidths suggesting turbulent supersonic motions in the clouds. These motions are usually invoked to explain why molecular clouds take much longer than a free-fall time to form stars. It has classically been…

Astrophysics · Physics 2011-02-11 Mordecai-Mark Mac Low

Here we model a star forming factory in which the continuous creation of stars results in a highly concentrated, massive (globular cluster-like) stellar system. We show that under very general conditions a large-scale gravitational…

One of the key problems in star formation research is to determine the role of magnetic fields. Starting from the atomic inter-cloud medium (ICM) which has density nH ~ 1 per cubic cm, gas must accumulate from a volume several hundred pc…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-13 Hua-bai Li , C. Darren Dowell , Alyssa Goodman , Roger Hildebrand , Giles Novak

The colliding flows (CF) model is a well-supported mechanism for generating molecular clouds. However, to-date most CF simulations have focused on the formation of clouds in the normal-shock layer between head-on colliding flows. We…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-05-31 Erica Fogerty , Adam Frank , Fabian Heitsch , Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback , Christina Haig , Marissa Adams

The evolution of molecular clouds in galactic centres is thought to differ from that in galactic discs due to a significant influence of the external gravitational potential. We present a set of numerical simulations of molecular clouds…

Turbulence in the interstellar medium (ISM) plays an important role in many physical processes, including forming stars and shaping complex ISM structures. In this work, we investigate the HI turbulent properties of the Small Magellanic…

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…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 Enrique Vazquez-Semadeni

We investigate the effect of star formation on turbulence in the Orion A and Ophiuchus clouds using principal component analysis (PCA). We measure the properties of turbulence by applying PCA on the spectral maps in $^{13}$CO, C$^{18}$O,…

[Abridged] Theoretical and numerical studies of star formation have shown that magnetic field (B) has a strong influence on both disk formation and fragmentation; even a relatively low B can prevent these processes. However, very few…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-12 Marc Joos , Patrick Hennebelle , Andrea Ciardi , Sebastien Fromang

In this paper we investigate the level of star formation activity within nearby molecular clouds. We employ a uniform set of infrared extinction maps to provide accurate assessments of cloud mass and structure and compare these with…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-19 Charles J. Lada , Marco Lombardi , João F. Alves

We examine various physical processes that may explain the shallow high-mass slope of the IMF as well as the low SFR in star-forming molecular clouds (MCs) in the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). We show that the strong tidal field and the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-03-15 Gilles Chabrier , Pierre Dumond

We study the effects of the magnetic fields on the formation of massive, self-gravitationally bound cores (MBCs) in high-speed cloud-cloud collisions (CCCs). Extending our previous work (Sakre et al. 2021), we perform magnetohydrodynamic…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-05-24 Nirmit Sakre , Asao Habe , Alex R. Pettitt , Takashi Okamoto , Rei Enokiya , Yasuo Fukui , Takashi Hosokawa

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2011-02-02 D. Falceta-Goncalves

We present ongoing hydrodynamic and MHD simulations of molecular cloud formation in spiral galaxies. The hydrodynamic results show the formation of molecular gas clouds where spiral shocks compress atomic gas to high densities. The spiral…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-06-27 Clare Dobbs , Daniel Price , Ian Bonnell

The initial mass function (IMF) of stars and the corresponding cloud mass function (CMF), traditionally considered universal, exhibit variations that are influenced by the local environment. Notably, these variations are apparent in the…