This project aims at investigating the possibility of star formation in high-velocity clouds. We analyze relevant physical processes (heating, cooling, heat conduction) by means of the AMR code FLASH. The simulations are carried out partly on the Astro Cluster at the Institute of Astrophysics and partly on the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC).

This work is funded partly by FWF project AP2109721 and partly by the Initiativkolleg I033-N - The Cosmic Matter Circuit.

For more information please see Bastian's research website.

Figure 1:

A 2D slice through the initial density distribution of a 3D simulated HVC. The cloud has a radius of 41.1 pc, and a mass of 6.5x10⁴ M_☉. The central density is 583 cm^-3 and slowly decreases to 5 cm^-3 at the cloud boundary. The finest resolution is 1.3 pc.