Speaker
Enrique Vazquez-Semadeni
(CRyA, UNAM)
Description
I present results from numerical simulations and an analytical model of the
formation and gravitational collapse of giant molecular clouds (GMCs). The
clouds develop a network of filaments at various scales, whose physical
properties we compare with recent observations. Simulations including
ionizing stellar feedback show that its effect is the destruction of the
local star-forming clump and suppression of its star formation activity,
attaining final efficiencies of the order of 10%. An analytical model of
this process matches, to within factors of a few, the evolutionary stages
observed in GMCs in the LMC, the age histograms of embedded clusters in
the Galaxy, the locus of low-mass star-forming clouds and high-mass star-
forming clumps in the Kennicutt-Schmidt diagram, predicting that the
former evolve into the latter, and the dependence of the SFR on cloud
mass found by Gao & Solomon.
Author
Enrique Vazquez-Semadeni
(CRyA, UNAM)