Paolo Padoan
Associate ProfessorPh.D. Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, 1997
Personal Home page: http://cass.ucsd.edu/~ppadoan
A major goal of my research is to understand the origin of stars. The process of star formation is a crucial step in the chain of events leading to the origin of planets and life. It is also an important process in the evolution of galaxies, because stars provide a significant energy source to the interstellar medium and control its chemical enrichment. The first massive stars to appear in the universe were likely responsible for its re-ionization.
Because star-forming gas in galaxies is highly turbulent, the study of star formation involves the investigation of turbulence as well. A general theory of turbulence does not exist, but computer simulations of turbulent flows provide valuable information on their universal statistical properties. I conduct numerical experiments of super-sonic, self-gravitating magneto-hydrodynamic turbulence with physical parameters appropriate for describing star-forming gas in galaxies. Using adaptive mesh refinement methods, our numerical simulations may span a huge range of scales, from the size of stellar clusters to that of individual circumstellar disks. They thus describe the earliest stages of such disks in the appropriate framework of the large-scale cloud dynamics, providing a statistical distribution of self-consistent initial conditions for planet formation.
Selected Publications
Two Regimes of Turbulent Fragmentation and the Stellar Initial Mass Function from Primordial to Present-Day Star Formation, Paolo Padoan, Aake Nordlund, Alexei Kritsuk, Michael Norman, and Pak Shing Li, 2007, Astrophysical Journal, 661, 972.
High-Resolution Mapping of Interstellar Clouds by Near-Infrared Scattering, Paolo Padoan, Mika Juvela, and Veli-Matti Pelkonen, 2006, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 636, L101.
A Solution to the Pre-Main-Sequence Accretion Problem, Paolo Padoan, Alexei Kritsuk, Michael Norman, and Aake Nordlund, 2005, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 622, L61.
The 'Mysterious' Origin of Brown Dwarfs, Paolo Padoan and Aake Nordlund, 2004, Astrophysical Journal, 617, 559.
Structure Function Scaling in Compressible Super-Alfvenic MHDTurbulence , Paolo Padoan, Raul Jimenez, Aake Nordlund, and Stanislav Boldyrev, 2004, Physical Review Letters 92, 1102.
The Stellar Initial Mass Function from Turbulent Fragmentation, Paolo Padoan and Aake Nordlund, 2002, Astrophysical Journal, 576, 870.
A Super-Alfvnic Model of Dark Clouds, Paolo Padoan and Aake Nordlund, 1999, Astrophysical Journal, 526, 279.
©University of California, San Diego - Department of Physics 1998
Creation / Modification Date: February 1, 1999
