Interstellar Turbulence

This timely volume presents a series of review articles covering every aspect of interstellar turbulence--from accretion disks, molecular clouds, atomic and ionized media, through to spiral galaxies--based on a major international conference held in Mexico City. With advances in observational techniques and the development of more efficient computer codes and faster computers, research in this area has made spectacular progress in recent years. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the most important developments in observing and modeling turbulent flows in the cosmos. It provides graduate students and researchers with a state-of-the-art summary of observational, theoretical and computational research in interstellar turbulence.

1. Turbulence in the interstellar medium: a retrospective review; 2. Mechanism of formation of atmospheric turbulence relevant for optical astronomy; 3. Properties of atomic gas in spiral galaxies; 4. Turbulence in the ionized gas in spiral galaxies; 5. Probing interstellar turbulence in the warm ionized medium using emission lines; 6. The spectrum and galactic distribution of microturbulence in diffuse ionized gas; 7. Small scale structure and turbulence in the interstellar medium; 8. What is the Reynolds number of the Reynolds' layer?; 9. Photoionized gas in the galactic halo; 10. Turbulent heating of the diffuse ionized gas; 11. Cosmic rays in interstellar turbulence; 12. Turbulence in line-driven stellar winds; 13. An introduction to compressible MHD turbulence; 14. Turbulence in atomic hydrogen; 15. Supershells in spiral galaxies; 16. The size distribution of superbubbles in the interstellar medium; 17. Large-scale motions in the ISM of elliptical and spiral galaxies; 18. Vortical motions driven by supernova explosions; 19. The intermittent dissipation of turbulence: is it observed in the interstellar medium?; 20. Chemistry in turbulent flows; 21. Supersonic turbulence in giant extragalactic HII regions; 22. Turbulence in HII regions: new results; 23. Hypersonic turbulence of H2O masers; 24. Water masers tracing alfvenic turbulence and magnetic fields in W51 M and W49 N; 25. Turbulence in the Ursa Major cirrus cloud; 26. The collisions of HVCs with a magnetized gaseous disk; 27. The initial stellar mass function as a statistical sample of turbulent cloud structure; 28. The structure of molecular clouds: are they fractal?; 29. Diagnosing properties of turbulent flows from spectral line observations of the molecular interstellar medium; 30. Centroid velocity increments as a probe of the turbulent velocity field in interstellar molecular clouds; 31. High-resolution C18O mapping observations of Heiles' cloud 2 - statistical properties of the line width; 32. Observations of magnetic fields in dense interstellar clouds: implications for MHD turbulence and cloud evolution; 33. The density PDFs of supersonic random flows; 34. Turbulence as an organizing agent in the ISM; 35. Turbulence and magnetic reconnection in the interstellar medium; 36. The evolution of self-gravitating, magnetized, turbulent clouds: numerical experiments; 37. Super-Alfvenic turbulent fragmentation in molecular clouds; 38. Decay timescales of MHD turbulence in molecular clouds; 39. Numerical magnetohydrodynamic studies of turbulence and star formation; 40. Direct numerical simulations of compressible magnetohydrodynamical turbulence; 41. Fragmentation in molecular clouds: the formation of a stellar cluster; 42. Accretion disk turbulence.