Astrophysical gases such as the interstellar-, circumgalactic-, or intracluster-medium are commonly multiphase, which poses the question of the structure of these systems. While there are many known processes leading to fragmentation of cold gas embedded in a (turbulent) hot medium, in this work, we focus on the reverse process: coagulation. This is often seen in wind-tunnel and shearing layer simulations, where cold gas fragments spontaneously coalesce. Using 2D and 3D hydrodynamical simulations, we find that sufficiently large (≫cstcool), perturbed cold gas clouds develop pulsations which ensure cold gas mass growth over an extended period of time (≫r/cs). This mass growth efficiently accelerates hot gas which in turn can entrain cold droplets, leading to coagulation. The attractive inverse square force between cold gas droplets has interesting parallels with gravity; the ‘monopole’ is surface area rather than mass. We develop a simple analytic model which reproduces our numerical findings.
Astrophysical gases are commonly multiphase and highly turbulent. In this work, we investigate the survival and growth of cold gas in such a turbulent, multiphase medium using three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations. Similar to previous work simulating coherent flow (winds), we find that cold gas survives if the cooling time of the mixed gas is shorter than the Kelvin–Helmholtz time of the cold gas clump (with some weak additional Mach number dependence). However, there are important differences. Near the survival threshold, the long-term evolution is highly stochastic, and subject to the existence of sufficiently large clumps. In a turbulent flow, the cold gas continuously fragments, enhancing its surface area. This leads to exponential mass growth, with a growth time given by the geometric mean of the cooling and the mixing time. The fragmentation process leads to a large number of small droplets which follow a scale-free dN/dm ∝ m−2 mass distribution, and dominate the area covering fraction. Thus, whilst survival depends on the presence of large ‘clouds’, these in turn produce a ‘fog’ of smaller droplets tightly coupled to the hot phase which are probed by absorption line spectroscopy. We show with the aid of Monte Carlo simulations that the simulated mass distribution emerges naturally due to the proportional mass growth and the coagulation of droplets. We discuss the implications of our results for convergence criteria of larger scale simulations and observations of the circumgalactic medium.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10362540
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Volume:
- 511
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0035-8711
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 859-876
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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