Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Mark Krumholz: Turbulence, Feedback, and Slow Star Formation

UMCP astronomy colloquium by Mark Krumholz, a postdoc at Princeton after doing his PhD at Berkeley. The major mystery of star formation is why it is so slow - the SFR is 100 times smaller than predicted based on free fall times. Krumholz & McKee have developed a theory where turbulence holds up star formation and the turbulence itself is produced by star formation. He showed that a fairly simple physical theory reproduces the observation results. The remaining problems are taking into account magnetic fields and explaining the 100 km/s turbulence seen in starbursts.

Keywords : star formation

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