What result is predicted if interstellar clouds completely lacked turbulent support?
Star formation would proceed much faster, leading to a lower average stellar mass.
Turbulence injects significant kinetic energy, acting as a substantial dynamic pressure that keeps regions from collapsing too easily. If this energetic stirring mechanism were absent, the overall resistance to gravity would drop sharply, primarily leaving only the much weaker thermal pressure and potentially rotational/magnetic effects. Without this barrier, smaller regions within the cloud would cross the Jeans threshold much more readily and quickly. This easier and faster fragmentation into smaller, denser clumps would result in a star formation process occurring much more rapidly overall and yielding an average stellar mass that is significantly lower than observed distributions suggest.
