Fragmentation and turbulence in collapsing gas clouds

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Clouds, Fragmentation, Gravitational Collapse, Nebulae, Stellar Evolution, Turbulence, Centrifugal Force, Coriolis Effect, Differential Equations, Hydrodynamics, Morphology, Rotation, Taylor Instability, Velocity Distribution

Scientific paper

Four simulations of the collapse of uniformly rotating isothermal gas clouds using the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method to solve the hydrodynamical equations are presented. In all cases the result is a central disk-like massive object surrounded by many less massive fragments located in the equatorial plane, collapsing on their own and carrying most of the angular momentum. The origin of these structures is found to be Jeans and Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities seeded from a small random initial perturbation spectrum. It is also shown that in each simulation turbulent motions are generated from the input of gravitational energy. By analyzing these motions it was found that a turbulent spectrum with a slope about 0.5 always develops very rapidly and remains constant through the rest of the collapse. Only a very little dependence on initial conditions of this slope was found. It is shown that turbulence may slow down the collapse by a factor up to 10(3), and that the time scale for turbulence dissipation is a better characteristic time scale for star formation than the free-fall time. It is also suggested that the roughly constant initial mass function found in various regions may be a result of the turbulence.

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