710 research outputs found
The Power Spectrum of Turbulence in NGC 1333: Outflows or Large-Scale Driving?
Is the turbulence in cluster-forming regions internally driven by stellar
outflows or the consequence of a large-scale turbulent cascade? We address this
question by studying the turbulent energy spectrum in NGC 1333. Using synthetic
13CO maps computed with a snapshot of a supersonic turbulence simulation, we
show that the VCS method of Lazarian and Pogosyan provides an accurate estimate
of the turbulent energy spectrum. We then apply this method to the 13CO map of
NGC 1333 from the COMPLETE database. We find the turbulent energy spectrum is a
power law, E(k) k^-beta, in the range of scales 0.06 pc < ell < 1.5 pc, with
slope beta=1.85\pm 0.04. The estimated energy injection scale of stellar
outflows in NGC 1333 is ell_inj 0.3 pc, well resolved by the observations.
There is no evidence of the flattening of the energy spectrum above the scale
ell_inj predicted by outflow-driven simulations and analytical models. The
power spectrum of integrated intensity is also a nearly perfect power law in
the range of scales 0.16 pc < ell < 7.9 pc, with no feature above ell_inj. We
conclude that the observed turbulence in NGC 1333 does not appear to be driven
primarily by stellar outflows.Comment: Submitted to APJ Letters on September 22, 2009 - Accepted on November
18, 200
Mass and Magnetic distributions in Self Gravitating Super Alfvenic Turbulence with AMR
In this work, we present the mass and magnetic distributions found in a
recent Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) MHD simulation of supersonic, \sa, self
gravitating turbulence. Powerlaw tails are found in both volume density and
magnetic field probability density functions, with and . A power law is also found between
magnetic field strength and density, with , throughout
the collapsing gas. The mass distribution of gravitationally bound cores is
shown to be in excellent agreement with recent observation of prestellar cores.
The mass to flux distribution of cores is also found to be in excellent
agreement with recent Zeeman splitting measurements.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures (3 color). Submitted to the Astrophysical Journa
Adaptive Mesh Refinement for Supersonic Molecular Cloud Turbulence
We performed a series of three-dimensional numerical simulations of
supersonic homogeneous Euler turbulence with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and
effective grid resolution up to 1024^3 zones. Our experiments describe
non-magnetized driven supersonic turbulent flows with an isothermal equation of
state. Mesh refinement on shocks and shear is implemented to cover dynamically
important structures with the highest resolution subgrids and calibrated to
match the turbulence statistics obtained from the equivalent uniform grid
simulations.
We found that at a level of resolution slightly below 512^3, when a
sufficient integral/dissipation scale separation is first achieved, the
fraction of the box volume covered by the AMR subgrids first becomes smaller
than unity. At the higher AMR levels subgrids start covering smaller and
smaller fractions of the whole volume, which scale with the Reynolds number as
Re^{-1/4}. We demonstrate the consistency of this scaling with a hypothesis
that the most dynamically important structures in intermittent supersonic
turbulence are strong shocks with a fractal dimension of two. We show that
turbulence statistics derived from AMR simulations and simulations performed on
uniform grids agree surprisingly well, even though only a fraction of the
volume is covered by AMR subgrids. Based on these results, we discuss the
signature of dissipative structures in the statistical properties of supersonic
turbulence and their role in overall flow dynamics.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, revised versio
Dispersion of Observed Position Angles of Submillimeter Polarization in Molecular Clouds
One can estimate the characteristic magnetic field strength in GMCs by
comparing submillimeter polarimetric observations of these sources with
simulated polarization maps developed using a range of different values for the
assumed field strength. The point of comparison is the degree of order in the
distribution of polarization position angles. In a recent paper by H. Li and
collaborators, such a comparison was carried out using SPARO observations of
two GMCs, and employing simulations by E. Ostriker and collaborators. Here we
reexamine this same question, using the same data set and the same simulations,
but using an approach that differs in several respects. The most important
difference is that we incorporate new, higher angular resolution observations
for one of the clouds, obtained using the Hertz polarimeter. We conclude that
the agreement between observations and simulations is best when the total
magnetic energy (including both uniform and fluctuating field components) is at
least as large as the turbulent kinetic energy.Comment: revised, accepted version; to appear in The Astrophysical Journal; 20
pages, 2 figures, 2 table
The Two States of Star Forming Clouds
We examine the effects of self-gravity and magnetic fields on supersonic
turbulence in isothermal molecular clouds with high resolution simulations and
adaptive mesh refinement. These simulations use large root grids (512^3) to
capture turbulence and four levels of refinement to capture high density, for
an effective resolution of 8,196^3. Three Mach 9 simulations are performed, two
super-Alfv\'enic and one trans-Alfv\'enic. We find that gravity splits the
clouds into two populations, one low density turbulent state and one high
density collapsing state. The low density state exhibits properties similar to
non-self-gravitating in this regime, and we examine the effects of varied
magnetic field strength on statistical properties: the density probability
distribution function is approximately lognormal; velocity power spectral
slopes decrease with field strength; alignment between velocity and magnetic
field increases with field; the magnetic field probability distribution can be
fit to a stretched exponential. The high density state is characterized by
self-similar spheres; the density PDF is a power-law; collapse rate decreases
with increasing mean field; density power spectra have positive slopes,
P({\rho},k) \propto k; thermal-to-magnetic pressure ratios are unity for all
simulations; dynamic-to-magnetic pressure ratios are larger than unity for all
simulations; magnetic field distribution is a power-law. The high Alfv\'en Mach
numbers in collapsing regions explain recent observations of magnetic influence
decreasing with density. We also find that the high density state is found in
filaments formed by converging flows, consistent with recent Herschel
observations. Possible modifications to existing star formation theories are
explored.Comment: 19 pages, 20 figure
Scaling Laws and Intermittency in Highly Compressible Turbulence
We use large-scale three-dimensional simulations of supersonic Euler
turbulence to study the physics of a highly compressible cascade. Our numerical
experiments describe non-magnetized driven turbulent flows with an isothermal
equation of state and an rms Mach number of 6. We find that the inertial range
velocity scaling deviates strongly from the incompressible Kolmogorov laws. We
propose an extension of Kolmogorov's K41 phenomenology that takes into account
compressibility by mixing the velocity and density statistics and preserves the
K41 scaling of the density-weighted velocity v=rho^{1/3}u. We show that
low-order statistics of 'v' are invariant with respect to changes in the Mach
number. For instance, at Mach 6 the slope of the power spectrum of 'v' is -1.69
and the third-order structure function of 'v' scales linearly with separation.
We directly measure the mass dimension of the "fractal" density distribution in
the inertial subrange, D_m=2.4, which is similar to the observed fractal
dimension of molecular clouds and agrees well with the cascade phenomenology.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures; in press, AIP Conference Proceedings: "Turbulence
and Nonlinear Processes in Astrophysical Plasmas", Waikiki Beach, Hawaii,
March 21, 200
Comparing Numerical Methods for Isothermal Magnetized Supersonic Turbulence
We employ simulations of supersonic super-Alfvenic turbulence decay as a
benchmark test problem to assess and compare the performance of nine
astrophysical MHD methods actively used to model star formation. The set of
nine codes includes: ENZO, FLASH, KT-MHD, LL-MHD, PLUTO, PPML, RAMSES, STAGGER,
and ZEUS. We present a comprehensive set of statistical measures designed to
quantify the effects of numerical dissipation in these MHD solvers. We compare
power spectra for basic fields to determine the effective spectral bandwidth of
the methods and rank them based on their relative effective Reynolds numbers.
We also compare numerical dissipation for solenoidal and dilatational velocity
components to check for possible impacts of the numerics on small-scale density
statistics. Finally, we discuss convergence of various characteristics for the
turbulence decay test and impacts of various components of numerical schemes on
the accuracy of solutions. We show that the best performing codes employ a
consistently high order of accuracy for spatial reconstruction of the evolved
fields, transverse gradient interpolation, conservation law update step, and
Lorentz force computation. The best results are achieved with divergence-free
evolution of the magnetic field using the constrained transport method, and
using little to no explicit artificial viscosity. Codes which fall short in one
or more of these areas are still useful, but they must compensate higher
numerical dissipation with higher numerical resolution. This paper is the
largest, most comprehensive MHD code comparison on an application-like test
problem to date. We hope this work will help developers improve their numerical
algorithms while helping users to make informed choices in picking optimal
applications for their specific astrophysical problems.Comment: 17 pages, 5 color figures, revised version to appear in ApJ, 735,
July 201
Mach number dependence of the onset of dynamo action
The effect of compressibility on the onset of nonhelical turbulent dynamo
action is investigated using both direct simulations as well as simulations
with shock-capturing viscosities, keeping however the regular magnetic
diffusivity. It is found that the critical magnetic Reynolds number increases
from about 35 in the subsonic regime to about 70 in the supersonic regime. In
the high resolution direct simulations the shock structures are much sharper
than in the low resolution shock-capturing simulations. Nevertheless, the
magnetic field looks roughly similar in both cases and does not show shock
structures. Similarly, the onset of dynamo action is not significantly affected
by the shock-capturing viscosity.Comment: 6 page
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