Chemical Evolution of Turbulent Multiphase Molecular Clouds

TL;DR

This paper investigates how turbulence influences the chemical evolution of molecular clouds, focusing on the formation and distribution of molecules like CH+ through high-resolution simulations.

Contribution

It introduces high-resolution simulations that incorporate molecular gas evolution under turbulent dynamics to study chemical abundance impacts.

Findings

Turbulence transports H2 to low-density, warm regions.

Enhanced H2 abundance boosts formation of high-endothermic molecules.

Simulations reveal significant chemical diversity driven by turbulence.

Abstract

Molecular clouds are essentially made up of atomic and molecular hydrogen, which in spite of being the simplest molecule in the ISM plays a key role in the chemical evolution of molecular clouds. Since its formation time is very long, the H2 molecules can be transported by the turbulent motions within the cloud toward low density and warm regions, where its enhanced abundance can boost the abundances of molecules with high endothermicities. We present high resolution simulations where we include the evolution of the molecular gas under the effect of the dynamics, and we analyze its impact on the abundance of CH+.