Poster abstract

I will show results from recent high-resolution numerical simulations of self-gravitating turbulence. Sink particles are used to model the collapse and accretion of dense cores, and thus to measure the mass function and star formation rates of the dense gas. It is shown that the star formation rate depends sensitively on the turbulence forcing. In particular, compressive (curl-free) forcing produces star formation rates more than one order of magnitude higher than solenoidal (divergence-free) forcing at the same RMS Mach number. This suggests that analytic models of the star formation rate should take the turbulence forcing into account, as the rate depends more strongly on the forcing than on the Mach number of the turbulence.