Do you want to publish a course? Click here

Striations in molecular clouds: Streamers or MHD waves?

89   0   0.0 ( 0 )
 Added by Aris Tritsis
 Publication date 2016
  fields Physics
and research's language is English




Ask ChatGPT about the research

Dust continuum and molecular observations of the low column density parts of molecular clouds have revealed the presence of elongated structures which appear to be well aligned with the magnetic field. These so-called striations are usually assumed to be streams that flow towards or away from denser regions. We perform ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations adopting four models that could account for the formation of such structures. In the first two models striations are created by velocity gradients between ambient, parallel streamlines along magnetic field lines. In the third model striations are formed as a result of a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability perpendicular to field lines. Finally, in the fourth model striations are formed from the nonlinear coupling of MHD waves due to density inhomogeneities. We assess the validity of each scenario by comparing the results from our simulations with previous observational studies and results obtained from the analysis of CO (J = 1 - 0) observations from the Taurus molecular cloud. We find that the first three models cannot reproduce the density contrast and the properties of the spatial power spectrum of a perpendicular cut to the long axes of striations. We conclude that the nonlinear coupling of MHD waves is the most probable formation mechanism of striations.



rate research

Read More

We investigate the spectral correlations between different species used to observe molecular clouds. We use hydrodynamic simulations and a full chemical network to study the abundances of over 150 species in typical Milky Way molecular clouds. We perform synthetic observations in order to produce emission maps of a subset of these tracers. We study the effects of different lines of sight and spatial resolution on the emission distribution and perform a robust quantitative comparison of the species to each other. We use the Spectral Correlation Function (SCF), which quantifies the root mean squared difference between spectra separated by some length scale, to characterize the structure of the simulated cloud in position-position-velocity (PPV) space. We predict the observed SCF for a broad range of observational tracers, and thus, identify homologous species. In particular, we show that the pairs C and CO, C$^{+}$ and CN, NH$_3$ and H$_2$CS have very similar SCFs. We measure the SCF slope variation as a function of beam size for all species and demonstrate that the beam size has a distinct effect on different species emission. However, for beams of up to 10, placing the cloud at 1 kpc, the change is not large enough to move the SCF slopes into different regions of parameter space. The results from this study provide observational guidance for choosing the best tracer to probe various cloud length scales.
64 - Robert Sych 2015
The review addresses the spatial frequency morphology of sources of sunspot oscillations and waves, including their localization, size, oscillation periods, height localization with the mechanism of cut-off frequency that forms the observed emission variability. Dynamic of sunspot wave processes, provides the information about the structure of wave fronts and their time variations, investigates the oscillation frequency transformation depending on the wave energy is shown. The initializing solar flares caused by trigger agents like magnetoacoustic waves, accelerated particle beams, and shocks are discussed. Special attention is paid to the relation between the flare reconnection periodic initialization and the dynamics of sunspot slow magnetoacoustic waves. A short review of theoretical models of sunspot oscillations is provided.
The MHD version of the adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code, MG, has been employed to study the interaction of thermal instability, magnetic fields and gravity through 3D simulations of the formation of collapsing cold clumps on the scale of a few parsecs, inside a larger molecular cloud. The diffuse atomic initial condition consists of a stationary, thermally unstable, spherical cloud in pressure equilibrium with lower density surroundings and threaded by a uniform magnetic field. This cloud was seeded with 10% density perturbations at the finest initial grid level around n=1.1 cm^{-3} and evolved with self-gravity included from the outset. Several cloud diameters were considered (100 pc, 200 pc and 400 pc) equating to several cloud masses (17,000 Msun, 136,000 Msun and 1.1x10^6 Msun). Low-density magnetic-field-aligned striations were observed as the clouds collapse along the field lines into disc-like structures. The induced flow along field lines leads to oscillations of the sheet about the gravitational minimum and an integral-shaped appearance. When magnetically supercritical, the clouds then collapse and generate hourglass magnetic field configurations with strongly intensified magnetic fields, reproducing observational behaviour. Resimulation of a region of the highest mass cloud at higher resolution forms gravitationally-bound collapsing clumps within the sheet that contain clump-frame supersonic (M~5) and super-Alfvenic (M_A~4) velocities. Observationally realistic density and velocity power spectra of the cloud and densest clump are obtained. Future work will use these realistic initial conditions to study individual star and cluster feedback.
Using self-gravitational hydrodynamical numerical simulations, we investigated the evolution of high-density turbulent molecular clouds swept by a colliding flow. The interaction of shock waves due to turbulence produces networks of thin filamentary clouds with a sub-parsec width. The colliding flow accumulates the filamentary clouds into a sheet cloud and promotes active star formation for initially high-density clouds. Clouds with a colliding flow exhibit a finer filamentary network than clouds without a colliding flow. The probability distribution functions (PDFs) for the density and column density can be fitted by lognormal functions for clouds without colliding flow. When the initial turbulence is weak, the column density PDF has a power-law wing at high column densities. The colliding flow considerably deforms the PDF, such that the PDF exhibits a double peak. The stellar mass distributions reproduced here are consistent with the classical initial mass function with a power-law index of $-1.35$ when the initial clouds have a high density. The distribution of stellar velocities agrees with the gas velocity distribution, which can be fitted by Gaussian functions for clouds without colliding flow. For clouds with colliding flow, the velocity dispersion of gas tends to be larger than the stellar velocity dispersion. The signatures of colliding flows and turbulence appear in channel maps reconstructed from the simulation data. Clouds without colliding flow exhibit a cloud-scale velocity shear due to the turbulence. In contrast, clouds with colliding flow show a prominent anti-correlated distribution of thin filaments between the different velocity channels, suggesting collisions between the filamentary clouds.
Aims. We seek to understand how the 4.8 GHz formaldehyde absorption line is distributed in the MON R2, S156, DR17/L906, and M17/M18 regions. More specifically, we look for the relationship among the H2CO, 12CO, and 13CO spectral lines. Methods. The four regions of MON R2 (60x90), S156 (50x70), DR17/L906 (40x60), and M17 /M18 (70x80)were observed for H2CO (beam 10), H110a recombination (beam 10), 6 cm continuum (beam 10), 12CO (beam 1), and 13CO (beam 1). We compared the H2CO,12CO,13CO, and continuum distributions, and also the spectra line parameters of H2CO,12CO, and 13CO. Column densities of H2CO,13CO, and H2 were also estimated. Results. We found out that the H2CO distribution is similar to the 12CO and the 13CO distributions on a large scale. The correlation between the 13 CO and the H2CO distributions is better than between the 12CO and H2CO distributions. The H2CO and the 13CO tracers systematically provide consistent views of the dense regions. T heir maps have similar shapes, sizes, peak positions, and molecular spectra and present similar centr al velocities and line widths. Such good agreement indicates that the H2CO and the 13CO arise from similar regions.
comments
Fetching comments Fetching comments
mircosoft-partner

هل ترغب بارسال اشعارات عن اخر التحديثات في شمرا-اكاديميا