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arXiv 0810.5406astro-ph
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星系中的恒星形成:螺旋臂、Turbulence和触发机制

Star Formation in Disks: Spiral Arms, Turbulence, and Triggering Mechanisms

Bruce G. Elmegreen

摘要:

由于轨道拥挤、云碰撞和引力不稳定性的综合作用,螺旋臂中的恒星形成得到了加强。这种不稳定性的特征质量在气体中为10^7兆太阳能,在恒星中为10^5兆太阳能,其形态是一串熟悉的珠子,间距为1-2千秒差距。共振环和潮汐尾也有类似的不稳定性。来自恒星压力的连续触发以两种方式发生。对于短时间和近距离,它发生在明亮的边缘和密集的结,在云扩散过程中滞后。在很长一段时间里,它发生在后掠的贝壳和清除区域的周边。第一种情况应该很常见,但很难从同一星云中独立的恒星形成中解脱出来。第二种情况有因果关系条件和崩溃条件,通常很容易识别。湍流触发产生了一个致密的云结构层次和一个相关的年轻恒星位置层次。在恒星形成的持续时间和区域的大小之间也应该有一个相关性,类似于气体中的大小-线宽关系。宇宙学背景是由高红移星系中恒星形成的观测提供的。目前还没有观测到连续的湍流触发,但引力不稳定性是可以观测到的,它们的尺度比局部不稳定性大3倍,质量大100倍。这很容易解释为ISM湍流速度增加约5倍的结果。在高红移的团簇星系中,团簇是如此之大,以至于它们应该相互作用并在中心合并,在那里它们形成或有助于隆起。

英文摘要:

Star formation is enhanced in spiral arms because of a combination of orbit crowding, cloud collisions, and gravitational instabilities. The characteristic mass for the instability is 10^7 Msun in gas and 10^5 Msun in stars, and the morphology is the familiar beads on a string with 1-2 kpc separation. Similar instabilities occur in resonance rings and tidal tails. Sequential triggering from stellar pressure occurs in two ways. For short times and near distances, it occurs in the bright rims and dense knots that lag behind during cloud dispersal. For long times, it occurs in swept-up shells and along the periphery of cleared regions. The first case should be common but difficult to disentangle from independent star formation in the same cloud. The second case has a causality condition and a collapse condition and is often easy to recognize. Turbulent triggering produces a hierarchy of dense cloudy structure and an associated hierarchy of young star positions. There should also be a correlation between the duration of star formation and the size of the region that is analogous to the size-linewidth relation in the gas. The cosmological context is provided by observations of star formation in high redshift galaxies. Sequential and turbulent triggering is not yet observable, but gravitational instabilities are, and they show a scale up from local instabilities by a factor of ~3 in size and ~100 in mass. This is most easily explained as the result of an increase in the ISM turbulent speed by a factor of ~5. In the clumpiest galaxies at high redshift, the clumps are so large that they should interact with each other and merge in the center, where they form or contribute to the bulge.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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