Related papers: Cold Dark Clouds: The Initial Conditions for Star …
Most stars are born in rich young stellar clusters (YSCs) embedded in giant molecular clouds. The most massive stars live out their short lives there, profoundly influencing their natal environments by ionizing HII regions, inflating…
Star formation is intimately linked to the dynamical evolution of molecular clouds. Turbulent fragmentation determines where and when protostellar cores form, and how they contract and grow in mass via accretion from the surrounding cloud…
How do stars manage to form within low-density, HI-dominated gas? Such environments provide a laboratory for studying star formation with physical conditions distinct from starbursts and the metal-rich disks of spiral galaxies where most…
Star clusters form in dense, hierarchically collapsing gas clouds. Bulk kinetic energy is transformed to turbulence with stars forming from cores fed by filaments. In the most compact regions, stellar feedback is least effective in removing…
How and when the mass distribution of stars in the Galaxy is set is one of the main issues of modern astronomy. Here we present a statistical study of mass and density distributions of infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) and fragments within them.…
To understand the formation of stellar groups, one must first document carefully the birth pattern within real clusters and associations. In this study of Taurus-Auriga, we combine pre-main-sequence ages from our own evolutionary tracks…
We use a spherical hydrodynamics code to show that in cold dark matter cosmologies, the first stars form at z=50 through the direct collapse of gas in low-mass systems (approx 10^4 solar masses). Photons from the first stars easily…
Molecular clouds (MC) are the densest and coldest component of the interstellar gas, and the sites of star formation. They are also turbulent and fractal and their masses and sizes span several orders of magnitude. It is also generally…
Research on Galactic Center star formation is making great advances, in particular due to new data from interferometers spatially resolving molecular clouds in this environment. These new results are discussed in the context of established…
Star formation is inefficient. Recent advances in numerical simulations and theoretical models of molecular clouds show that the combined effects of interstellar turbulence, magnetic fields and stellar feedback can explain the low…
Understanding star formation is problematic as it originates in the large scale dynamics of a galaxy but occurs on the small scale of an individual star forming event. This paper presents the first numerical simulations to resolve the star…
The process that leads to the formation and early evolution of low-mass stars is in a broad sense well understood theoretically and carefully traced observationally. The largest uncertainties in this framework reside in the poorly known…
We investigate the impact of different initial conditions for the initial density profile and the initial turbulence on the formation process of protostellar clusters. We study the collapse of dense molecula r cloud cores with…
Even today in our Galaxy, stars form from gas cores in a variety of environments, which may affect the properties of resulting star and planetary systems. Here we study the role of pressure, parameterized via ambient clump mass surface…
The dense, cold regions where high-mass stars form are poorly characterised, yet they represent an ideal opportunity to learn more about the initial conditions of high-mass star formation (HMSF), since high-mass starless cores (HMSCs) lack…
From studying the cosmic microwave background, we know our Universe started out very simple. It was by and large homogeneous and isotropic, with small fluctuations that can be described by linear perturbation theory. In stark contrast, the…
On galactic scales, the surface density of star formation appears to be well correlated with the surface density of molecular gas. This has lead many authors to suggest that there exists a causal relationship between the chemical state of…
A sample of 1.3 mm continuum cores in the Dragon infrared dark cloud (also known as G28.37+0.07 or G28.34+0.06) is analyzed statistically. Based on their association with molecular outflows, the sample is divided into protostellar and…
Stars are usually formed in clusters in the dense cores of molecular clouds. These embedded clusters show a wide variety of morphologies from hierarchical clusters with substructure to centrally condensed ones. Often they are elongated and…
Low-mass protostars form from condensations inside molecular clouds when gravity overwhelms thermal and magnetic supporting forces. The first phases of the formation of a solar-type star are characterized by dramatic changes not only in the…