1 / 30

Understanding Molecular Clouds: Structure, Dynamics, and Kinetics in Astronomy

This document explores the intricacies of molecular clouds, focusing on their emission characteristics, chemical compositions, density structures, and kinematics. It delves into the emissions of CO and rare isotopes like 13CO and C18O, highlights challenges in distinguishing chemistry from dynamics, and discusses clump identification and cloud lifetimes. The analysis incorporates Doppler shifts, density maps, and magnetic influences, providing insights into the dynamic environments where star formation occurs. The complexity of molecular cloud structures and their observable phenomena is emphasized throughout.

thuraya
Télécharger la présentation

Understanding Molecular Clouds: Structure, Dynamics, and Kinetics in Astronomy

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Molecular Clouds 8 April 2003 Astronomy G9001 - Spring 2003 Prof. Mordecai-Mark Mac Low

  2. Molecular Emission • CO emission • Quickly becomes optically thick • Rare isotopes have lower optical depth: 13CO and C18O • More easily photodissociated than H2 • Only traces H2 over limited column density • Reveals dynamics through Doppler shifts of lines • Other molecules (NH3, H2S, H2O, OH…) • Different critical densities for quenching of emission • Can be hard to distinguish chemistry from dynamics

  3. Dopita & Sutherland Diffuse Matter, 2002 Chemistry • In centers of molecular clouds, where CRs dominate H2 ionization, chemistry driven by • Once H3+ is formed, it transfers protons • For example • with n < 100 cm-3:

  4. with n > 300 cm-3: • CH3+ can also react with C or N to form C2 or CN: • Other ways of making C2 include through ion-molecule reactions involving C+, followed by charge-exchange or dissociative recombination

  5. Grains • Continuum emission • Radiative transfer must be modeled to derive density structure • Varying temperatures near heating sources (stars, shocks) also complicate • Absorption against background stars • Optical has low dynamic range • Near-IR better (NICE: Lada et al 1994, Cambresy et al 2002) • Both require uniform background star field (eg MW disk) • Reveal limitations of molecular emission line measurements

  6. Extinction Map of Taurus Padoan, Cambrésy & Langer 2002

  7. Structure of Clouds • Density structure shows clumps and filaments at all scales • column density maps show fractal structure • self-similar structure extends to largest scales • Supersonic velocity dispersions seen • line centroids also show strong dispersions • velocity structure self-similar to largest scales

  8. Bensch, Stutzki & Ossenkopf 2001 IRAM: Falgarone et al. 1998 CfA: Heithausen & Thaddeus 1990 KOSMA: Bensch et al. 2001

  9. Molecular Cloud Kinematics • Molecular line ratioes show cloud temperatures to be of order 10 K, with sound speeds ~0.2 km/s • Line widths are much broader than thermal, corresponding to random motions of order 1-10 km/s, or Mach numbers 5-50. • Strong shocks should be produced, quickly dissipating the kinetic energy.

  10. Clump Finding • Clumps identified in position-velocity space frequently used. • Clump mass spectrum • But only works for isolated clumps! Williams, de Geus & Blitz 1994

  11. Super-position Single clumps in PV space come from multiple regions. Only truly isolated clumps can be reliably measured Ballesteros-Paredes & Mac Low 2002

  12. Larson’s Laws (or at least Suggestions) • Larson (1981) suggested with α ~ -1 and β ~ 0.5 • Density law implies constant column density • equipartition between KE & PE? • lack of dynamic range in observations? More likely (e.g. Kegel 1989, Scalo 1990, Ballesteros-Paredes & Mac Low 2002) • Velocity law appears to result from turbulence

  13. Virial Theorem • Eulerian virial theorem (McKee & Zweibel 1992): • Usually simplified by neglecting time-dependent terms and kin, and taking homogeneous clouds: mag grav moment of inertia deriv inertia flux deriv internal energies surface terms surface term internal energies grav mag

  14. Pressure balance • Gravity balancing turbulence: • External pressure and gravitational collapse • as R decreases, gravity becomes more important

  15. Balance gravity and magnetic field (both have R-4 dependence) • gravitational collapse occurs if M > MCR • However, real interstellar clouds are not isolated, but have substantial ram pressures acting on them, so kin  0 and shapes change (Ballesteros-Paredes et al 1999) • ram pressure confinement may dominate

  16. Masses • Virial mass • Derive… • XCO

  17. Magnetostatic Cores (or not?) • Observed dense cores suggested to be magnetostatically supported • Column density contrast through magnetostatic cores insufficient to explain observed cores (Nakano 1998) • Millimeter maps of dense cores show that roughly half have central protostars, while only 1 in 7 might be expected for magnetostatic cores modulated by ambipolar diffusion

  18. Magnetic Fields • Near-IR polarization • traces fields in surfaces of molecular clouds • although clouds transparent in near-IR, dust grains deep within less efficient at polarization • Masers • trace fields at very high densities n > 106 cm-3 • OH Zeeman measurements (Crutcher et al 1999) • suggests that fields (barely) insufficient to provide magnetostatic support

  19. Supersonic Motions • In standard scenario, magnetic fields converted shocks into linear Alfvén waves, acting as a lossless spring that stores and returns KE, maintaining supersonic motions. • Computations of turbulence decay demonstrate that non-linear MHD waves interact strongly, dissipating energy quickly (Mac Low et al. 1998, Stone et al. 1998) • Observed motions must be more or less continuously driven

  20. Molecular Cloud Lifetimes • Cloud lifetimes estimated by Blitz & Shu (1980) to be around 30 Myr in Milky Way • Locations downstream from spiral arms • Stellar ages associated with GMCs • Much shorter lifetimes of 5-10 Myr proposed by Ballesteros-Paredes et al. (1999), Fukui et al. (1998). • Lack of 10 Myr old T Tauri stars • Cluster ages vs. associated molecular gas • Individual cloud lifetimes vs. ensemble lifetime

  21. Assignments • Read Flash User’s Guide Chapters 5, 8, 9.1, 12, 15.2, and 18.2.1 • Read the review paper “Turbulence in Molecular Clouds” by E. Vázquez-Semadeni, astro-ph/9701050 • I will release Exercise 6 as soon as I’m convinced it works

  22. Adaptive Mesh Refinement • Original methods developed by Berger & Oliger (1984) and Berger & Colella (1989)used subgrids that were allowed to • rotate with respect to axes • merge with other subgrids • have arbitrary shapes • Very flexible and memory efficient, but complex to program and hard to parallelize. • Instead only refine fixed blocks (De Zeeuw & Powell 1993, MacNiece et al 2000: PARAMESH)

  23. Mesh Refinement • subdivision of blocks, not zones • quad-tree in 2D, oct-tree in 3D • blocks distributed among processors for load-balancing • neighbors may never differ by more than one level • top level only one block (!)

  24. Block Structure PARAMESH User’s Guide • Guard cells used for interpolation, boundary conditions • Flash with PPM: • nxb = 8 • nguard = 4 • Blocks may be declared “empty” (eg to serve as physical obstacles)

  25. Load Balancing • Peano-Hilbert space-filling curve drawn through grid blocks • Gives “Morton-ordered” list of blocks • Blocks consecutively assigned to processors from list Flash User’s Guide • This increases chance of neighboring blocks being on same processor • Parent, leaf blocks get different weighting • List divided among processors for load balance

  26. Refinement Criterion • Choice of refinement criterion depends strongly on problem to be solved (this can be a black art!) • Default Flash criterion is 2nd order error estimate (Löhner 1987). In one dimension it is: • Setting filters out small ripples

  27. Other Refinement Criteria • The Löhner error criterion picks out discontinuities in the flow. • Sometimes other things are more appropriate • density enhancements • high or low temperature regions • regions with strong diffusion • Any of these can be marked for refinement in addition to or instead of regions with high E.

  28. Interpolation Across Boundaries • Flux must be conserved at boundaries between different resolution blocks • On Cartesian grid, add fluxes from fine grid • Curvilinear grids also require area factors • Fine grid guard cells m filled by interpolation on coarse grid. • Order of interpolation must match order of algorithm.

  29. Prolongation • Fine zones filled from coarse zones on refinement • Interpolation must be same order as solution • Care must be taken at boundaries to maintain conservation • Different order interpolation routines available in Flash.

  30. Magnetic Fields • Magnetic fields on AMR remains a problem • Transfer of fluxes requires addition of edge-centered electric fields, which works • Prolongation gives div B errors • Flash corrects using Poisson solver (inexact & expensive) • Balsara (2001) proposes area-weighted solution.

More Related