Supersonic Cloud Collision-II

Abstract

In this second paper of the sequel of two papers, we further investigate the problem of molecular cloud (MC) collision. Anathpindika (2009) (hereafter paper I) considered highly supersonic cloud collisions and examined the effect of bending and shearing instabilities on the shocked gas slab. We now consider moderately supersonic cloud collisions (precollision cloud velocities of order 1.2 km s${}^{-1}$ to 2.4 km s${}^{-1}$). In the current paper, we present five SPH simulations of fast head-on and/or off-centre cloud collisions to study the evolution of ram pressure confined gas slabs. The relevant thermodynamics in the problem is simplified by adopting a simple barytropic equation of state. We explore the parameter space by varying the pre-collision velocity and the temperature of the post collision gas slab. The temperature in a pressure compressed gas slab is crucial to its dynamical evolution. The pressure confined gas slabs become Jeans unstable if the average sound crossing time, $t_{cr}$, of putative clumps condensing out of them, is much larger than their free fall time, $t_{ff}$. Self gravitating clumps may spawn multiple/larger $N$-body star clusters. Warmer gas slabs are unlikely to fragment and may end up as diffuse gas clouds.

10pages, 8 figures, 1 table; A&A accepted Typographical errors have been attempted to and the original manuscript has been trimmed. The results however, remain unchanged. The pictures in this version are of considerably lower resolution in order to minimise their sizes

References in corpus (9)

• SPLASH: An interactive visualisation tool for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations
• A SCUBA survey of Orion, the low-mass end of the core mass function
• On the Structure of the Orion A Cloud and the Formation of the Orion Nebula Cluster
• Radiative transfer and the energy equation in SPH simulations of star formation
• Ionisation-induced star formation I: The collect and collapse model
• Supersonic Cloud Collision - I
• Star formation bursts in isolated spiral galaxies
• Star Formation in the Trifid Nebula
• Low-Mass Star Forming Cores in the GF9 Filament

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Molecular Clouds Toward the Super Star Cluster NGC3603; Possible Evidence for a Cloud-Cloud Collision in Triggering the Cluster Formation
• Star formation towards the Scutum tangent region and the effects of Galactic environment
• Was a cloud-cloud collision the trigger of the recent star formation in Serpens?
• FOREST Unbiased Galactic plane Imaging survey with the Nobeyama 45-m telescope (FUGIN) 2: Possible evidence for formation of NGC~6618 cluster in M17 by cloud-cloud collision
• Coupling local to global star formation in spiral galaxies: the effect of differential rotation
• FOREST unbiased Galactic plane imaging survey with the Nobeyama 45 m telescope (FUGIN): Possible evidence of cloud-cloud collisions triggering high-mass star formation in the giant molecular cloud M16 (Eagle Nebula)
• On the evolution of irradiated turbulent clouds: A comparative study between modes of triggered star-formation
• Formation of accretion centers in simulations of colliding uniform density H${}_2$ cores
• Simulations of un-equal binary collisions embedded in a turbulent gas cloud far away of a massive gravitational center