A Fractal Origin for the Mass Spectrum of Interstellar Clouds

Details A Fractal Origin for the Mass Spectrum of Interstellar Clouds A Fractal Origin for the Mass Spectrum of Interstellar Clouds

Nov 1996

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996apj...471..816e&link_type=abstract

Astrophysical Journal v.471, p.816

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

253

Ism: Clouds, Ism: Structure, Turbulence

Scientific paper

Interstellar molecular clouds have power-law size L and mass M distributions of the form n(L)dL = L-αLdL and n(M)dM = M-αMdM, where M ∝ LK is also a power law. These relations are shown to result from the fractal and scale-free nature of interstellar gas with power indices that are independent of distance. The results are αL = 1 + D and αM = 1 + D/K for interstellar fractal dimension D = 2.3±0.3 and a value of K in the range 2.4-3.7, as determined from cloud surveys in the literature. The same fractal dimension also results from the expected relation D = K when the M(L) correlation includes many different surveys, spanning a range of 1010 in mass. These results imply that interstellar CO clouds are the unresolved parts of a pervasive fractal structure in the interstellar gas. The similarity between n(M) for interstellar clouds and n(M) for globular clusters suggests that the clusters formed inside fractal progenitor clouds at a nearly constant efficiency.

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