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| Paper: |
Structure and Fragmentation of Turbulent Interstellar Clouds |
| Volume: |
429, Numerical Modeling of Space Plasma Flows, Astronum-2009 |
| Page: |
59 |
| Authors: |
Audit, E.; Hennebelle, P. |
| Abstract: |
It is well established that the atomic interstellar hydrogen
is filling the galaxies and constitutes the building blocks of
molecular clouds. To understand the formation and the evolution of
molecular clouds, it is necessary to investigate the dynamics of a
turbulent and thermally bistable flow. We perform high resolution
3-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of 2-phase, isothermal and
polytropic flows. We compare the density PDF in the various
simulations and conclude that 2-phase flows behave rather differently
than polytropic flows. We also extract the clumps and study their
statistical properties such as mass spectrum and mass-size relation.
In each case, it is found that the behavior is well represented by a
simple powerlaw. The structures statistics are very similar to what
has been inferred from observations, in particular the mass spectrum
and the mass-size relation. Our results suggest that in spite of
various statistics being similar for 2-phase and polytropic flows,
they nevertheless present significant differences, stressing the
necessity to consider the proper thermal structure of the interstellar
atomic hydrogen for computing its dynamics as well as the formation of
molecular clouds. |
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