A multi-year PRACE project (ID: 2018194729)
PI: Paolo Padoan
Collaborators: Troels Haugbølle, Åke Nordlund, Zu-Jia Lu, Veli-Matti Pelkonen, Mika Juvela, Liubin Pan
PROJECT SUMMARY
This project tackles the multi-scale nature of star formation with state-of-the-art adaptive-mesh-refinement methods, addressing four key questions: 1) What causes the disruption of molecular clouds, thus setting the local efficiency of star formation? 2) How can we explain the dichotomy between the global (Galactic) and local (molecular clouds) star-formation rates? 3) What is the expected variance of the star-formation rate at different scales? 4) What is the real accretion rate of massive stars? The computational model is ground-breaking, as it provides a self-consistent descption of star formation and supernova-feedback for the first time. This is achievedby resolving the formation of individual massive stars, so the location and position of the supernovae is determined self-consistently by the star-formation proces.To properly resolve the turbulent cascade driven by supernova explosions, the formation of individual massive stars, and the evolution of supernova remnants, the dynamic ranges of space and time scales are 0.01 pc to 250 pc and 0.01 yr to 70 Myr, respectively. This represents a challenging high-performance computing problem even with state-of-the-art codes and supercomputing systems.Three-color images of the whole 250-pc volume and two regions of massive star formation:
Other three-color images. These are large png files showing x, y, and z directions from three snapshots.
snap_839_x_600_fft.pngColumn-density maps showing x, y, and z directions from three snapshots.
NH2_x_2048_snap_839_shift.fitsTime evolution movies of two molecular clouds:
Movie of Cloud C10
Time evolution plots for the whole molecular-cloud catalog: