The Dynamics of Charged Dust in Magnetized Molecular Clouds

Understand

We study the dynamics of large, charged dust grains in turbulent giant molecular clouds (GMCs).

• Massive dust grains behave as aerodynamic particles in primarily neutral dense gas, and thus are able to produce dramatic small-scale fluctuations in the dust-to-gas ratio.
• Hopkins & Lee (2016) directly simulated the dynamics of neutral dust grains in super-sonic MHD turbulence, typical of GMCs, and showed that the dust-to-gas fluctuations can exceed factor ~1000 on small scales, with important implications for star formation, stellar abundances, and dust behavior and growth.
• However, even in primarily neutral gas in GMCs, dust grains are negatively charged and Lorentz forces are non-negligible.