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Project Progress

The past year has led to two published articles related to this topic, and a third one submitted. Two of these describe the results of the first ever simulations of the mixing of material by supersonic turbulence of the type that occurs in star forming molecular clouds (Pan & Scannapieco 2010, 2011). In the third of these (Pan et al. 2011), we bought in a new collaborator, John Scalo, from UT Austin and extended our approach to study the self-enrichment of clusters in the early universe. Here we derived new results constraining the transition from primordial star formation, in which stars are made purely of hydrogen in helium, to “Population II” star formation, in which stars are enriched with heavy elements and surrounded by protostellar disks that may form planets. This work was presented in several presentations, including an invited talk by E.Scannapieco at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics program on the Nature of Turbulence, and invited talks by L. Pan at the Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.