Related papers: Star Formation Thresholds
It is believed that the majority of stars form in clusters. Therefore it is likely that the gas physical conditions that prevail in forming clusters, largely determine the properties of stars that form and in particular the initial mass…
Criteria for gravitational collapse of expanding shells in rotating, shearing galaxy disks were determined using three-dimensional numerical simulations in the thin shell approximation. The simulations were run over a grid of 7 independent…
We develop a simple analytical criterion to investigate the role of the environment on the onset of star formation. We will consider the main external agents that influence the star formation (i.e. ram pressure, tidal interaction,…
Star formation by gravitational instabilities, sequential triggering, and turbulence triggering are briefly reviewed in order to compare the various mechanisms that are observed in main galaxy disks with those in the inner kiloparsec…
Recent observations have revealed massive galactic molecular outflows that may have physical conditions (high gas densities) required to form stars. Indeed, several recent models predict that such massive galactic outflows may ignite star…
Molecular gas disks are generally Toomre stable ($Q_T>$1) and yet clearly gravitationally unstable to structure formation as evidenced by the existence of molecular clouds and ongoing star formation. This paper adopts a 3D perspective to…
The interstellar medium of galaxies is composed of multiple phases, including molecular, atomic, and ionized gas, as well as dust. Stars are formed within this medium from cold molecular gas clouds, which collapse due to their gravitational…
We present an analytical model of the relation between the surface density of gas and star formation rate in galaxies and clouds, as a function of the presence of supersonic turbulence and the associated structure of the interstellar…
Observational advances over the last decade reveal that star formation is associated with the simultaneous presence of gravitationally collapsing gas, bipolar outflow, and an accretion disk. Two theoretical views of star formation suppose…
The concept that stars form in the modern era began some 60 years ago with the key observation of expanding OB associations. Now we see that these associations are an intermediate scale in a cascade of hierarchical structures that begins on…
We address the cosmological evolution of violent gravitational instability in high-redshift, massive, star-forming galactic discs. To this aim, we integrate in time the equations of mass and energy conservation under self-regulated…
Star formation in galaxies is triggered by a combination of processes, including gravitational instabilities, spiral wave shocks, stellar compression, and turbulence compression. Some of these persist in the far outer regions where the…
A spectrophotometric model able to compute the integrated spectrum of a galaxy, including the contribution both of the stellar populations and of the ionized interstellar gas of the HII regions powered by young hot stars, has been used to…
Star formation is enhanced in spiral arms because of a combination of orbit crowding, cloud collisions, and gravitational instabilities. The characteristic mass for the instability is 10^7 Msun in gas and 10^5 Msun in stars, and the…
We carry out global three-dimensional radiation hydrodynamical simulations of self-gravitating accretion discs to determine if, and under what conditions, a disc may fragment to form giant planets. We explore the parameter space (in terms…
Gravitational instability plays a substantial role in the evolution of galaxies. Various schemes to include it in galaxy evolution models exist, generally assuming that the Toomre $Q$ parameter is self-regulated to $Q_\mathrm{crit}$, the…
We discuss star formation in the turbulent interstellar medium. We argue that morphological appearance and dynamical evolution of the gas is primarily determined by supersonic turbulence, and that stars form via a process we call…
We propose a simple analytic model to understand when star formation is time-steady versus bursty in galaxies. Recent models explain the observed Kennicutt-Schmidt relation between star formation rate and gas surface densities in galaxies…
It is shown that a first-order cosmological perturbation theory for Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker universes admits one and only one gauge-invariant variable which describes the perturbation to the energy density and which becomes…
Cold-mode gas accretion onto galaxies is a direct prediction of LCDM simulations and provides galaxies with fuel that allows them to continue to form stars over the lifetime of the Universe. Given its dramatic influence on a galaxy's gas…