Nickolas Moeckel edited abstract.tex  over 10 years ago

Commit id: 7a26d0ed98ab6235c32d93e4e1973f3a5a6fb983

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The classical picture of a star-forming filament is a near-equilibrium structure, with collapse dependent on its gravitational criticality. Recent observations have complicated this picture, revealing filaments as a mess of apparently interacting subfilaments, with transsonic internal velocity dispersions and mildly supersonic intra-subfilament dispersions. How structures like this form is unresolved. Here we study the velocity and spatial structure of filamentary regions in a simulation of part of a turbulent molecular cloud. We present two main findings: first, these velocity structures arise naturally in self gravitating hydrodynamic simulations without the need for magnetic or other effects. Second, a region that is filamentary in projection and displays these velocity characteristics may in fact be made of spatially distinct clumps. The fact that these disjoint structures can masquerade as coherent clumps in both projection and velocity diagnostics highlights the need to continue developing sophisticated filamentary analysis techniques for star formation observations.