Observational study of origin of the interstellar turbulence

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We discovered small-scale structures of molecular clouds by high-resolution 12CO observations. The small-scale structures have much smaller velocity dispersions of the spectra compared to typical ones observed in the middle of molecular clouds. These imply that molecular clouds are not uniform entities, but consist of cold and dense small-scale structures in the thermal equilibrium, as suggested by the theoretical two-phase medium model and thermal instability of the warm neutral medium. These results gave clues about molecular cloud formation, one of the biggest issues of the interstellar physics. The follow-up observations of molecular and atomic gas with high angular resolution by ALMA and others are scheduled to solve the problems.