Related papers: Spiral arm triggering of star formation
Supersonic turbulence is an essential element in understanding how structure within interstellar gas is created and shaped. In the context of star formation, many computational studies show that the mass spectrum of density and velocity…
Giant molecular clouds (GMCs) are the primary reservoirs of cold, star-forming molecular gas in the Milky Way and similar galaxies, and thus any understanding of star formation must encompass a model for GMC formation, evolution, and…
In recent years there has been a growing interest in studying giant molecular filaments (GMFs), which are extremely elongated (> 100pc in length) giant molecular clouds (GMCs). They are often seen as inter-arm features in external spiral…
We invoke star formation triggered by cloud-cloud collisions to explain global star formation rates of disk galaxies and circumnuclear starbursts. Previous theories based on the growth rate of gravitational perturbations ignore the…
We revisit an alternate explanation for the turbulent nature of molecular clouds - namely, that velocity dispersions matching classical predictions of driven turbulence can be generated by the passage of clumpy material through a shock.…
Spiral shocks are potentially a major source of turbulence in the interstellar medium. To address this problem quantitatively, we use numerical simulations to investigate gas flow across spiral arms in vertically stratified,…
Although the basic physics of star formation is classical, numerical simulations have yielded essential insights into how stars form. They show that star formation is a highly nonuniform runaway process characterized by the emergence of…
The gravitational instability of expanding shells triggering the formation of clouds and stars is analyzed. Disks with different scale-heights, ambient and shell velocity dispersions, mid-plane densities, rotation rates and shear rates are…
Galaxy-wide star formation can be quenched by a number of physical processes such as environmental effects (e.g., ram pressure stripping) and supernova feedback. Using numerical simulations, we here demonstrate that star formation can be…
Essentially all stars form in giant molecular clouds (GMCs). However, inside GMCs, most of the gas does not participate in star formation; rather, denser gas accumulates in clumps in the GMC, with the bulk of the stars in a given GMC…
We study effect of magnetic field on massive dense core formation in colliding unequal molecular clouds by performing magnetohydrodynamic simulations with sub-parsec resolution (0.015 pc) that can resolve the molecular cores. Initial clouds…
To understand the formation of stars from clouds of molecular gas, one essentially needs to know two things: What gas collapses, and how long it takes to do so. We address these questions by embedding pseudo-Lagrangian tracer particles in…
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…
The observed gas dynamics in the Milky Way can only be explained by a bar in the galactic center. Such a bar is directly visible in the near-IR maps of the bulge, where it causes a distinctive asymmetric light distribution pattern. Another…
The radii of young (<100 Myr) star clusters correlate only weakly with their masses. This shallow relation has been used to argue that impulsive tidal perturbations, or `shocks', by passing giant molecular clouds (GMCs) preferentially…
We investigate how the properties of Galactic giant molecular clouds (GMCs) and their denser substructures (clumps) correlate with the local star formation rate. We trace clouds using the $^{12}$CO(3-2) transition, as observed by the CO…
We describe an overall picture of galactic-scale star formation. Recent high-resolution magneto-hydrodynamical simulations of two-fluid dynamics with cooling/heating and thermal conduction have shown that the formation of molecular clouds…
We investigate the formation of substructure in spiral galaxies using global MHD simulations, including gas self-gravity. Our models extend previous local models by Kim and Ostriker (2002) by including the full effects of curvilinear…
The properties of young star clusters formed within a galaxy are thought to vary in different interstellar medium (ISM) conditions, but the details of this mapping from galactic to cluster scales are poorly understood due to the large…
Star formation in high-redshift dwarf galaxies is a key to understand early galaxy evolution in the early Universe. Using the three-dimensional hydrodynamics code GIZMO, we study the formation mechanism of cold, high-density gas clouds in…