7,413 research outputs found
The evolution of Giant Molecular Filaments
In recent years there has been a growing interest in studying giant molecular
filaments (GMFs), which are extremely elongated (> 100pc in length) giant
molecular clouds (GMCs). They are often seen as inter-arm features in external
spiral galaxies, but have been tentatively associated with spiral arms when
viewed in the Milky Way. In this paper, we study the time evolution of GMFs in
a high-resolution section of a spiral galaxy simulation, and their link with
spiral arm GMCs and star formation, over a period of 11Myrs. The GMFs generally
survive the inter-arm passage, although they are subject to a number of
processes (e.g. star formation, stellar feedback and differential rotation)
which can break the giant filamentary structure into smaller sections. The GMFs
are not gravitationally bound clouds as a whole, but are, to some extent,
confined by external pressure. Once they reach the spiral arms, the GMFs tend
to evolve into more substructured spiral arm GMCs, suggesting that GMFs may be
precursors to arm GMCs. Here, they become incorporated into the more complex
and almost continuum molecular medium that makes up the gaseous spiral arm.
Instead of retaining a clear filamentary shape, their shapes are distorted both
by their climb up the spiral potential and their interaction with the gas
within the spiral arm. The GMFs do tend to become aligned with the spiral arms
just before they enter them (when they reach the minimum of the spiral
potential), which could account for the observations of GMFs in the Milky Way.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, MNRAS accepte
Vacuum Polarization by a Magnetic Flux Tube at Finite Temperature in the Cosmic String Spacetime
In this paper we analyse the effect produced by the temperature in the vacuum
polarization associated with charged massless scalar field in the presence of
magnetic flux tube in the cosmic string spacetime. Three different
configurations of magnetic fields are taken into account: a homogeneous
field inside the tube, a field proportional to and a
cylindrical shell with -function. In these three cases, the axis of the
infinitely long tube of radius coincides with the cosmic string. Because
the complexity of this analysis in the region inside the tube, we consider the
thermal effect in the region outside. In order to develop this analysis, we
construct the thermal Green function associated with this system for the three
above mentioned situations considering points in the region outside the tube.
We explicitly calculate in the high-temperature limit, the thermal average of
the field square and the energy-momentum tensor.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur
Dynamics of dark energy with a coupling to dark matter
Dark energy and dark matter are the dominant sources in the evolution of the
late universe. They are currently only indirectly detected via their
gravitational effects, and there could be a coupling between them without
violating observational constraints. We investigate the background dynamics
when dark energy is modelled as exponential quintessence, and is coupled to
dark matter via simple models of energy exchange. We introduce a new form of
dark sector coupling, which leads to a more complicated dynamical phase space
and has a better physical motivation than previous mathematically similar
couplings.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, revtex, references adde
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