Stars and interstellar dust interaction

[felipe.hez]

Hi guys, 

I'm kinda new to this software and this is my first post, after several days of trying to solve this problem:

Am trying to simulation how stellar wind affects the gas clouds in interstellar space. 

https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1106a/

(reference picture from Hubble)

When new stars are born in high density regions, the ignition and radiation of these stars create winds that pushes the dust around them, sculpting away the surrounding molecular cloud. These winds can reveal this hidden star formation process and sometimes accelerate it, when this expansion compress another high density spots, this slowly collapsing cloud will form a new star. These places are also called stellar nurseries.

So, i'm trying to visualice is the first parts of this process, the way stellar wind sculpts and reveal the clouds around them. I've modeled a random cloud to represent the very uneven density distribution.

Where i'm having problem is in getting this "wind" to affect more the lowest density regions.

I tried with a couple of fan forces in oposite directions and kinda worked, but could not get to work a mask using the density field, maybe is posible, but i couldn't do it.

Then i tried a gas field wrangle to get a another velocity field "wind", from the origin and multiply it by a factor inverse to the density squared (see screenshot)

This also kinda worked, but i get a very voxely looking render (video attached), maybe with a higher resolution and some blurring node somewhere could improve this.

I also would like to achieve the effect that the winds is slowly expanding trough space (since the spatial scales here are huge), maybe i could bound it to an expanding sphere? (i dont like that the wind effect is instantaneous in all the scene) maybe some kind of raycast could be an option? i'm open to ideas, coz i don't even know how to begin to google that :/

That's what i've tried so far, would be really happy if someone could share some ideas or resources!

Thanks in advance.

pd1: another idea i would love to implement is to fake the dust colapse by gravity with some clumping also based on density (i tried with gasshred and gas surface tension with poor results)

pd2: Eventually, i would like to get this expansion and subsequent peripheral density increase around to spark the birth of new stars. I don't know if is posible to create fuel from a certain density threshold or something like that. But that's a second post i guess. 

 

StarDust_07.hip

StellarWind_Advect2_1.mp4