Simulating the formation of filaments and prestellar cores in a turbulent interstellar cloud using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (astronomy)

The aim of this project is to simulate the formation of filaments and prestellar cores in a turbulent interstellar cloud, to explore carefully the parameters characterising interstellar turbulence and identify how they influence the properties of the filaments and prestellar cores that form, and to determine the circumstances under which turbulent fragmentation forms stars with a mass distribution and binary statistics matching observed stellar populations. The investigation will use Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, and will start with simple self-gravitating hydrodynamics and a barotropic equation of state; then thermal, radiative and chemical processes will be added; and finally we
will incorporate the scheme of Hosking & Whitworth (2004) for treating nonideal magneto-hydrodynamics, and explore what influence this has. The student will become expert in interstellar gas dynamics and the associated chemical and radiative processes, star formation, and numerical magnetohydrodynamics.