HLRB Project pr32hu
Simulating molecular cloud formation in convergent flows
ITA Heidelberg

» Back to overview

Proposing Institution

ITA Heidelberg

Project Manager

Milica Milosavljevic
Albert-Ueberle_Str. 2
69120 Heidelberg

Abstract

Stars form within massive clouds of molecular gas known as giant molecular clouds, or GMCs. Understanding how these clouds are formed is therefore a crucial part of the study of the birth of stars. A promising theory for GMC formation suggests that these clouds form in places where streams of warm atomic gas collide. The collision compresses the gas, which becomes thermally unstable,breaking up into cold, dense clumps embedded within a larger­scale turbulent flow. However, current studies of this process have a number of drawbacks that limit their usefulness. They use a highly simplified treatment of the thermal energy balance of the gas, and have ignored its chemical evolution. It has therefore been difficult to directly compare the clouds formed in these simulations with observations of real GMCs in a meaningful fashion, and hence difficult to properly test the predictions of the theory. We will address this problem by performing three­dimensional adaptive mesh refinement simulations of cloud assembly with the FLASH code. These simulations will for the first time self-consistently model the assembly of the clouds, the thermal energy balance within them, and the chemical transition from atomic to molecular gas.