Formation and evolution of molecular clouds
Numerical simulation performed with FLASH.
Description of the simulation:
This simulation was originally presented in Zamora-Avilés et al. (2018) to investigate the formation and evolution of magnetised dense molecular structures. It models the collision of two cylindrical, converging flows in the warm neutral medium colliding at moderately supersonic relative velocities. The interaction triggers thermal instability due to the compression, leading to the formation of a cold, dense, neutral cloud at the center of the computational domain. As the simulation evolves, the newly formed cloud continues to accrete material from the inflows, gradually increasing in mass until it simultaneously becomes molecular and gravitationally unstable. The morphology of the resulting molecular cloud is dominated by a complex network of filamentary structures, which undergo hierarchical gravitational collapse, ultimately giving rise to star formation. Beyond its original purpose, this simulation has also served as a reference model in several studies: to analyze the magnetic field morphology in filaments (Gómez et al. 2018), to examine the energy balance between gravitational, kinetic, and magnetic components (Camacho et al. 2023), and to explore the Kennicutt–Schmidt relation as well as the star formation efficiency per free-fall time parameter (Zamora-Avilés et al. 2025).