Are supernovae driving turbulence in the solar neighborhood?

Context. Turbulence plays an important role in shaping the interstellar medium, and it strongly influences star formation. Aims. We aim to identify the physical processes capable of sustaining H I turbulence in the solar neighborhood. Methods. We compare recent H I line-of-sight velocity observations within a volume of radius 70–500 pc centered on the Sun with a suite of 1 kpc numerical simulations that include two distinct turbulent drivers: (i) supernova (SN) feedback and (ii) imposed large-scale turbulent forcing. For each simulation, we constructed synthetic sky maps that closely mimic the observational one, allowing for a consistent comparison between the simulations and the observational data. Results. The H I observations show a median velocity dispersion of 11.1 km s−1 in the solar neighborhood. The SN-driven simulations systematically underpredict this value, yielding dispersions in the range 4.9–6.7 km s−1. We find that the simulations with strong enough large-scale forcing can reproduce not only the median observed velocity dispersion but also the observed velocity distribution.