Speaker
Adam Ginsburg
(University of Colorado, Boulder / European Southern Observatory)
Description
Turbulence is one of the primary processes governing star formation. Many recent theories have determined the overall star formation rate of gas and even the shape of the initial mass function based purely on turbulent initial conditions. The key property governing star formation rates is the density distribution of the gas, which determines how much gas is above some "critical density" for the gas to become self-gravitating and initiate star formation. I will present a new method for measuring the shape of the density distribution in quiescent molecular clouds. These measurements are performed using ubiquitous low-frequency lines of H2CO and CO to measure the local density distribution. These measurements are used to place precise constraints on the shape of the density distribution of the gas. We distinguish between different analytic forms of the density distribution function, and in one case rule out a lognormal as the underlying distribution.
Author
Adam Ginsburg
(University of Colorado, Boulder / European Southern Observatory)