Massive young star clusters contain dozens or hundreds of massive stars that inject mechanical energy in the form of winds and supernova explosions, producing an outflow which expands into their surrounding medium, shocking it and forming structures
called superbubbles. The regions of shocked material can have temperatures in excess of 10$^6$ K, and emit mainly in thermal X-rays (soft and hard). This X-ray emission is strongly affected by the action of thermal conduction, as well as by the metallicity of the material injected by the massive stars. We present three-dimensional numerical simulations exploring these two effects, metallicity of the stellar winds and supernova explosions, as well as thermal conduction.
We develop an analytical model for the accretion and gravitational drag on a point mass that moves hypersonically in the midplane of a gaseous disk with a Gaussian vertical density stratification. Such a model is of interest for studying the interact
ion between a planet and a protoplanetary disk, as well as the dynamical decay of massive black holes in galactic nuclei. The model considers that the flow is ballistic, and gives fully analytical expressions for both the accretion rate onto the point mass, and the gravitational drag it suffers. The expressions are further simplified by taking the limits of a thick, and of a thin disk. The results for the thick disk reduce correctly to those for a uniform density environment (Canto et al. 2011). We find that for a thin disk (small vertical scaleheight compared to the gravitational radius) the accretion rate is proportional to the mass of the moving object and to the surface density of the disk, while the drag force is independent of the velocity of the object. The gravitational deceleration of the hypersonic perturber in a thin disk was found to be independent of its parameters (i.e. mass or velocity) and depends only on the surface mass density of the disk. The predictions of the model are compared to the results of three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations, with a reasonable agreement.
We model the cometary structure around Mira as the interaction of an AGB wind from Mira A, and a streaming environment. Our simulations introduce the following new element: we assume that after 200 kyr of evolution in a dense environment Mira entered
the Local Bubble (low density coronal gas). As Mira enters the bubble, the head of the comet expands quite rapidly, while the tail remains well collimated for a 100 kyr timescale. The result is a broad-head/narrow-tail structure that resembles the observed morphology of Miras comet. The simulations were carried out with our new adaptive grid code WALICXE, which is described in detail.
We used magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of interstellar turbulence to study the probability distribution functions (PDFs) of increments of density, velocity, and magnetic field. We found that the PDFs are well described by a Tsallis distributio
n, following the same general trends found in solar wind and Electron MHD studies. We found that the PDFs of density are very different in subsonic and supersonic turbulence. In order to extend this work to ISM observations we studied maps of column density obtained from 3D MHD simulations. From the column density maps we found the parameters that fit to Tsallis distributions and demonstrated that these parameters vary with the sonic and Alfven Mach numbers of turbulence. This opens avenues for using Tsallis distributions to study the dynamical and perhaps magnetic states of interstellar gas.
We review the use of velocity centroids statistics to recover information of interstellar turbulence from observations. Velocity centroids have been used for a long time now to retrieve information about the scaling properties of the turbulent veloci
ty field in the interstellar medium. We show that, while they are useful to study subsonic turbulence, they do not trace the statistics of velocity in supersonic turbulence, because they are highly influenced by fluctuations of density. We show also that for sub-Alfvenic turbulence (both supersonic and subsonic) two-point statistics (e.g. correlation functions or power-spectra) are anisotropic. This anisotropy can be used to determine the direction of the mean magnetic field projected in the plane of the sky.
The bipolar morphology of the planetary nebula (PN) K 3-35 observed in radio-continuum images was modelled with 3D hydrodynamic simulations with the adaptive grid code yguazu-a. We find that the observed morphology of this PN can be reproduced consid
ering a precessing jet evolving in a dense AGB circumstellar medium, given by a mass loss rate dot{M}_{csm}=5x10^{-5}M_{odot}/yr and a terminal velocity v_{w}=10 km/s. Synthetic thermal radio-continuum maps were generated from numerical results for several frequencies. Comparing the maps and the total fluxes obtained from the simulations with the observational results, we find that a model of precessing dense jets, where each jet injects material into the surrounding CSM at a rate dot{M}_j=2.8x10^{-4} {M_{odot}/yr (equivalent to a density of 8x10^{4} {cm}^{-3}, a velocity of 1500 km/s, a precession period of 100 yr, and a semi-aperture precession angle of 20 degrees agrees well with the observations.
