Abstract:
Astronomical observations provide strong evidences that molecular clouds are in supersonic turbulence states. Highly non-linear, apparently random, and chaotic properties of turbulence make it extremely difficult to understand turbulent molecular clouds through traditional analytical methods and from astronomical observations. Numerical simulation has become an important tool to study turbulence systems and has been widely used in understanding the nature of turbulent molecular clouds. Despite of simple assumptions being used, numerical turbulence simulations have successfully explained many observed properties of molecular clouds that have important consequences on star formation. I will review the latest progress on what we know about turbulence inside molecular clouds from observations and from numerical simulations, how important turbulence is on star formation theory, and the effects of ambipolar diffusion on weakly ionized turbulent molecular clouds from our non-ideal MHD turbulence simulations.
Coffee and tea will be served 20 minutes prior to the seminar.