No Arabic abstract
Motivated by observations of outflowing galaxies, we investigate the combined impact of magnetic fields and radiative cooling on the evolution of cold clouds embedded in a hot wind. We perform a collection of three-dimensional adaptive mesh refinement, magnetohydrodynamical simulations that span two resolutions, and include fields that are aligned and transverse to the oncoming, super-Alfvenic material. Aligned fields have little impact on the overall lifetime of the clouds over the non-magnetized case, although they do increase the mixing between the wind and cloud material by a factor of $approx 3.$ Transverse fields lead to magnetic draping, which isolates the clouds, but they also squeeze material in the direction perpendicular to the field lines, which leads to rapid mass loss. A resolution study suggests that the magnetized simulations have somewhat better convergence properties than non-magnetized simulations, and that a resolution of 64 zones per cloud radius is sufficient to accurately describe these interactions. We conclude that the combined effects of radiative cooling and magnetic fields are dependent on field orientation, but are unlikely to enhance cloud lifetimes beyond the effect of radiative cooling alone.
Cosmic rays (CRs) are thought to be an important feedback mechanism in star-forming galaxies. They can provide an important source of pressure support and possibly drive outflows. We perform multidimensional CR-magnetohydrodynamic simulations including transport by streaming and diffusion to investigate wind launching from an initially hydrostatic atmosphere by CRs. We estimate a characteristic Eddington limit on the CR flux for which the CR force exceeds gravity and compare it to simulated systems. Scaling our results to conditions in star-forming galaxies, we find that CRs are likely to contribute to driving outflows for a broad range of star formation environments. We quantify the momentum and energy transfer between CRs and gas, along with the associated mass outflow rates under different assumptions about the relative importance of streaming and diffusion for transport. In simulations with streaming, we observe the growth and saturation of the CR acoustic instability, but the CRs and gas remain well coupled, with CR momentum transferred efficiently to the gas even when this instability is present. Higher CR fluxes transferr more energy to the gas and drive stronger outflows. When streaming is present, most of the transferred energy takes the form of Alfv{e}n wave heating of the gas, raising its pressure and internal energy, with a lower fractional contribution to the kinetic energy of the outflow. We also consider runs with radiative cooling, which modifies gas temperature and pressure profiles but does not seem to have a large impact on the mass outflow for super-Eddington CR fluxes.
During the past decade the dynamical importance of magnetic fields in molecular clouds has been increasingly recognized, as observational evidence has accumulated. However, how a magnetic field affect star formation is still unclear. Typical star formation models still treat a magnetic fields as an isotropic pressure, ignoring the fundamental property of dynamically important magnetic fields: their direction. This study builds on our previous work which demonstrated how the mean magnetic field orientation relative to the global cloud elongation can affect cloud fragmentation. After the linear mass distribution reported earlier, we show here that the mass cumulative function (MCF) of a cloud is also regulated by the field orientation. A cloud elongated closer to the field direction tends to have a shallower MCF, in other words, a higher portion of the gas in high density. The evidence is consistent with our understanding of bimodal star formation efficiency discovered earlier, which is also correlated with the field orientations.
We discuss the effect of ram pressure on the cold clouds in the centers of cool-core galaxy clusters, and in particular, how it reduces cloud velocity and sometimes causes an offset between the cold gas and young stars. The velocities of the molecular gas in both observations and our simulations fall in the range of $100-400$ km/s, much lower than expected if they fall from a few tens of kpc ballistically. If the intra-cluster medium (ICM) is at rest, the ram pressure of the ICM only slightly reduces the velocity of the clouds. When we assume that the clouds are actually fluffier because they are co-moving with a warm-hot layer, the velocity becomes smaller. If we also consider the AGN wind in the cluster center by adding a wind profile measured from the simulation, the clouds are further slowed down at small radii, and the resulting velocities are in general agreement with the observations and simulations. Because ram pressure only affects gas but not stars, it can cause a separation between a filament and young stars that formed in the filament as they move through the ICM together. This separation has been observed in Perseus and also exists in our simulations. We show that the star-filament offset combined with line-of-sight velocity measurements can help determine the true motion of the cold gas, and thus distinguish between inflows and outflows.
We have investigated the dynamics of the molecular gas and the evolution of GMAs in the spiral galaxy M51 with the NRO 45-m telescope. The velocity components of the molecular gas perpendicular and parallel to the spiral arms are derived at each spiral phase from the distribution of the line-of-sight velocity of the CO gas. In addition, the shear motion in the galactic disk is determined from the velocity vectors at each spiral phase. It is revealed that the distributions of the shear strength and of GMAs are anti-correlated. GMAs exist only in the area of the weak shear strength and further on the upstream side of the high shear strength. GMAs and most of GMCs exist in the regions where the shear critical surface density is smaller than the gravitational critical surface density, indicating that they can stably grow by self-gravity and the collisional agglomeration of small clouds without being destroyed by shear motion. These indicate that the shear motion is an important factor in evolution of GMCs and GMAs.
We expand our study on the dispersion of polarization angles in molecular clouds. We show how the effect of signal integration through the thickness of the cloud as well as across the area subtended by the telescope beam inherent to dust continuum measurements can be incorporated in our analysis to correctly account for its effect on the measured angular dispersion and inferred turbulent to large-scale magnetic field strength ratio. We further show how to evaluate the turbulent magnetic field correlation scale from polarization data of sufficient spatial resolution and high enough spatial sampling rate. We apply our results to the molecular cloud OMC-1, where we find a turbulent correlation length of approximately 16 mpc, a turbulent to large-scale magnetic field strength ratio of approximately 0.5, and a plane-of-the-sky large-scale magnetic field strength of approximately 0.76 mG.