AAS 199th meeting, Washington, DC, January 2002
Session 149. Molecular Clouds, Cloud Cores, and Their Magnetic Fields
Oral, Thursday, January 10, 2002, 2:00-3:30pm, International Ballroom East

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[149.02] Kolmogorov-Burgers Model for Turbulence in Molecular Clouds

S. Boldyrev (ITP, Santa Barbara), A. Nordlund (NORDITA, Denmark), P. Padoan (Harvard U.)

The process of star formation in interstellar molecular clouds is believed to be controlled by driven supersonic magnetohydrodynamic turbulence. We suggest that in the inertial range such turbulence obeys the Kolmogorov law, while in the dissipative range it behaves as Burgers turbulence developing shock singularities. On the base of the She--Leveque analytical model we then predict the velocity power spectrum in the inertial range to be Ek~ k-1.74. This result reproduces the observational Larson law, \langle u2l \rangle~l0.74\cdots0.76, [Larson, MNRAS 194 (1981) 809] and agrees well with recent numerical findings by~Padoan and Nordlund [astro-ph/0011465]. The application of the model to more general dissipative structures, with higher fractal dimensionality, leads to better agreement with recent observational results.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: boldyrev@itp.ucsb.edu

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