Related papers: Clouds as Turbulent Density Fluctuations. Implicat…
The fragmentation of gas to form stars in molecular clouds is intrinsically linked to the turbulence within them. These internal motions are set at the birth of the cloud and may vary with galactic environment and as the cloud evolves. In…
Recent progress in the understanding of star formation is summarized. A consistent picture is emerging where molecular clouds form with turbulent velocity fields and clumpy substructure, imprinted already during their formation. The clouds…
Context. Supersonic disordered flows accompany the formation and evolution of MCs. It has been argued that turbulence can support against gravitational collapse and form hierarchical sub-structures. Aims. We study the time evolution of…
Filamentary structures are ubiquitous in the interstellar medium, yet their formation, internal structure, and longevity have not been studied in detail. We report the results from a comprehensive numerical study that investigates the…
Molecular clouds are supersonically turbulent. This turbulence governs the initial mass function and the star formation rate. In order to understand the details of star formation, it is therefore essential to understand the properties of…
Interstellar turbulence is driven over a wide range of scales by processes including spiral arm instabilities and supernovae, and it affects the rate and morphology of star formation, energy dissipation, and angular momentum transfer in…
Recently reported variations in the typical physical properties of Galactic and extra-Galactic molecular clouds (MCs), and in their ability to form stars have been attributed to local variations in the magnitude of interstellar pressure.…
We present an analysis of the large-scale molecular cloud structure and of the stability of clumpy structures in nearby molecular clouds. In our recent work, we identified a structural transition in molecular clouds by studying the…
In recent works, we proposed a hypothesis, according to which turbulence in gases is created by the mean field effect of an intermolecular potential. We discovered that, in a numerically simulated inertial flow, turbulent solutions indeed…
We examine the physical parameters that affect the accumulation of gas in molecular clouds to high column densities where the formation of stars takes place. In particular, we analyze the dense gas mass fraction (DGMF) in a set of…
We investigate the effect of turbulence on the combined condensational and collisional growth of cloud droplets by means of high resolution direct numerical simulations of turbulence and a superparticle approximation for droplet dynamics…
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…
We simulate fragmentation and gravitational collapse of cold, magnetized molecular clouds. We explore the nonlinear development of an instability mediated by ambipolar diffusion, in which the collapse rate is intermediate to fast…
In this paper we explore the relationship between protostellar outflows and turbulence in molecular clouds. Using 3-D numerical simulations we focus on the hydrodynamics of multiple outflows interacting within a parsec scale volume. We…
We propose that inward, subsonic flows arise from the local dissipation of turbulent motions in molecular clouds. Such "turbulent cooling flows" may account for recent observations of spatially extended inward motions towards dense cores.…
The asymmetries that arise when a mixing layer involves two miscible fluids of differing densities are investigated using incompressible (low-speed) direct numerical simulations. The simulations are performed in the temporal configuration…
We have used the AMR hydrodynamic code, MG, to perform idealised 3D MHD simulations of the formation of clumpy and filamentary structure in a thermally unstable medium without turbulence. A stationary thermally unstable spherical diffuse…
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…
The growth by condensation of small water droplets in a three-dimensional homogeneous isotropic turbulent flow is considered. Within a simple model of advection and condensation, the dynamics and growth of millions of droplets are…
We present a systematic analysis of the velocity structure functions (VSFs) of 167 molecular clouds with angular sizes greater than $\sim$176 arcmin$^2$ in three sectors of the Galactic mid-plane. We calculated the 1st- to 3rd-order VSFs…