Hydrodynamical simulations of a cloud of interacting gas fragments

Abstract

We present a full hydrodynamical investigation of a system of self-contained, interacting gas `cloudlets'. Calculations are performed using SPH, and cloudlets are allowed to collide, dissipate kinetic energy, merge and undergo local gravitational collapse. The numerical feasibility of such a technique is explored, and the resolution requirements examined. We examine the effect of the collision time and the velocity field on the timescale for evolution of the system, and show that almost all star formation will be confined to dense regions much smaller than the entire cloud. We also investigate the possibility, discussed by various authors, that such a system could lead to a power-law IMF by a process of repeated cloudlet coagulation, finding that in fact the inter-cloudlet collisions occur at too high a Mach number for merging to play an important part.

arXiv comment11 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Animations of calculations are available, contact D. Gittins if interested

References in corpus (5)

• Modelling Accretion in Protobinary Systems
• The Formation of Close Binary Systems by Dynamical Interactions and Orbital Decay
• Molecular Cloud Formation in Shock-Compressed Layers
• The Formation of Molecular Clouds
• Dynamically triggered star formation in giant molecular clouds

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Gas Kinematics on GMC scales in M51 with PAWS: cloud stabilization through dynamical pressure
• GMC formation by agglomeration and self gravity
• The epsilon Chamaeleontis young stellar group and the characterization of sparse stellar clusters
• Was a cloud-cloud collision the trigger of the recent star formation in Serpens?
• The star formation efficiency and its relation to variations in the initial mass function
• Clumpy shocks and the clump mass function
• Effective viscosity from cloud-cloud collisions in three-dimensional global SPH simulations
• The future of low-mass condensations in a core of molecular cloud
• The study of colliding molecular clumps evolution