The Formation of Molecular Clouds II: Thermal Instability in the Interstellar Medium Swept Up by a Strong Shock Wave

Details The Formation of Molecular Clouds II: Thermal Instability in the Interstellar Medium Swept Up by a Strong Shock Wave The Formation of Molecular Clouds II: Thermal Instability in the Interstellar Medium Swept Up by a Strong Shock Wave

Dec 1999

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999sf99.proc..114k&link_type=abstract

Star Formation 1999, Proceedings of Star Formation 1999, held in Nagoya, Japan, June 21 - 25, 1999, Editor: T. Nakamoto, Nobeyam

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We investigate the propagation of a shock wave into a warm neutal medium and cold neutral medium by one-dimensional hydrodynamic calculations with detailed treatment of thermal and chemical processes. The processes we treat in our calculation are photoelectric heating from small grains and PAHs, heating and ionization by cosmic rays and X-rays, heating by formation and destruction of molecular hydrogen, atomic line cooling from hydrogen Lyman-α, carbon, oxygen, iron, and silicon atoms, rovibrational line cooling from molecular hydrogen and Carbon monoxide, and atomic and molecular collisions with grains. Our main result shows that thermal instability inside the shock-compressed layer produces a geometrically thin, dense layer in which a large amount of hydrogen molecules are formed. Linear stability analysis shows that this thermally-collapsed layer will fragment into small molecular cloudlets which smallest scale is tens of astronomical units. We expect that frequent compression by supernova explosion, etc., in the galaxy makes the interstellar medium occupied by these small molecular cloudlets.

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