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Register a new userThe Inclination Correction to The Turbulence Structure Function of Thin Molecular Clouds and Its Application
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Lei Qian
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The energy cascade rate of turbulence can be measured with the structure function. In practice, the 3D velocity of the gas in molecular cloud is hard to measure, which makes the measurement of structure function difficult. In the case of thin molecular clouds perpendicular to the line of sight, the structure function $S^2_{ tt}$ can be measured with core velocity dispersion (CVD), ${rm CVD}^2=frac{1}{2}S^2_{ tt}$. This method was extended to the case when the thin molecular cloud is not perpendicular to the line of sight, with intersection angle $theta$, ${rm CVD}^2=frac{1}{2}S^2_{ tt}left(1-frac{1}{8}cos^2thetaright)R^{2/3}$, where $R$ can be expressed with elliptic integrals of the second kind $E(k,varphi)$ as $R=frac{2}{pi}E(costheta,frac{pi}{2})$.
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While the importance of supernova feedback in galaxies is well established, its role on the scale of molecular clouds is still debated. In this work, we focus on the impact of supernovae on individual clouds, using a high-resolution magneto-hydrodynamic simulation of a region of 250 pc where we resolve the formation of individual massive stars. The supernova feedback is implemented with real supernovae that are the natural evolution of the resolved massive stars, so their position and timing are self-consistent. We select a large sample of molecular clouds from the simulation to investigate the supernova energy injection and the resulting properties of molecular clouds. We find that molecular clouds have a lifetime of a few dynamical times, less then half of them contract to the point of becoming gravitationally bound, and the dispersal time of bound clouds, of order one dynamical time, is a factor of two shorter than that of unbound clouds. We stress the importance of internal supernovae, that is massive stars that explode inside their parent cloud, in setting the cloud dispersal time, and their huge overdensity compared to models where the supernovae are randomly distributed. We also quantify the energy injection efficiency of supernovae as a function of supernova distance to the clouds. We conclude that intermittent driving by supernovae can maintain molecular-cloud turbulence and may be the main process of cloud dispersal. The role of supernovae in the evolution of molecular clouds cannot be fully accounted for without a self-consistent implementation of their feedback.
We perform ideal MHD high resolution AMR simulations with driven turbulence and self-gravity and find that long filamentary molecular clouds are formed at the converging locations of large-scale turbulence flows and the filaments are bounded by gravity. The magnetic field helps shape and reinforce the long filamentary structures. The main filamentary cloud has a length of ~4.4 pc. Instead of a monolithic cylindrical structure, the main cloud is shown to be a collection of fiber/web-like sub-structures similar to filamentary clouds such as L1495. Unless the line-of-sight is close to the mean field direction, the large-scale magnetic field and striations in the simulation are found roughly perpendicular to the long axis of the main cloud, similar to 1495. This provides strong support for a large-scale moderately strong magnetic field surrounding L1495. We find that the projection effect from observations can lead to incorrect interpretations of the true three-dimensional physical shape, size, and velocity structure of the clouds. Helical magnetic field structures found around filamentary clouds that are interpreted from Zeeman observations can be explained by a simple bending of the magnetic field that pierces through the cloud. We demonstrate that two dark clouds form a T-shape configuration which are strikingly similar to the Infrared dark cloud SDC13 leading to the interpretation that SDC13 results from a collision of two long filamentary clouds. We show that a moderately strong magnetic field (M_A ~ 1) is crucial for maintaining a long and slender filamentary cloud for a long period of time ~0.5 million years.
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