Related papers: The Formation of Distributed and Clustered Stars i…

Molecular clouds are a fundamental ingredient of galaxies: they are the channels that transform the diffuse gas into stars. The detailed process of how they do it is not completely understood. We review the current knowledge of molecular…

Recent surveys of star forming regions have shown that most stars, and probably all massive stars, are born in dense stellar clusters. The mechanism by which a molecular cloud fragments to form several hundred to thousands of individual…

Star clusters are known to be formed in turbulent molecular clouds. How turbulence is driven in molecular clouds and what effect this has on star formation is still unclear. We compare a simulation setup with turbulent driving everywhere in…

Star formation is a multi-scale, multi-physics problem ranging from the size scale of molecular clouds ($\sim$10s pc) down to the size scales of dense prestellar cores ($\sim$0.1 pc) that are the birth sites of stars. Several physical…

Turbulent fragmentation determines where and when protostellar cores form, and how they contract and grow in mass from the surrounding cloud material. This process is investigated, using numerical models of self-gravitating molecular cloud…

The fragmentation of gas to form stars in molecular clouds is intrinsically linked to the turbulence within them. These internal motions are set at the birth of the cloud and may vary with galactic environment and as the cloud evolves. In…

We explore, through a simplified, semi-analytic model, the formation of dense clusters containing massive stars. The parent cloud spawning the cluster is represented as an isothermal sphere. This sphere is in near force balance between…

The observed rapid onset of star formation in molecular clouds requires rapid formation of dense fragments which can collapse individually before being overtaken by global gravitationally-driven flows. Many previous investigations have…

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…

We review progress in numerical simulations of star cluster formation. These simulations involve the bottom-up assembly of clusters through hierarchical mergers, which produces a fractal stellar distribution at young (~0.5 Myr) ages. The…

The question whether magnetic fields play an important role in the processes of molecular cloud and star formation has been debated for decades. Recent observations have revealed a simple picture that may help illuminate these questions:…

I review some recent work on low-mass star formation, with an emphasis on theory, basic principles, and unresolved questions. Star formation is both a gravitational fragmentation problem as well as an accretion problem. Molecular cloud…

Star formation is inefficient. Only a few percent of the available gas in molecular clouds forms stars, leading to the observed low star formation rate (SFR). The same holds when averaged over many molecular clouds, such that the SFR of…

We review the progress that has been made in observing and analyzing molecular cloud structure in recent years. Structures are self-similar over a wide range of scales with similar power law indices independent of the star forming nature of…

We carry out three-dimensional MHD simulations of star formation in turbulent, magnetized clouds, including ambipolar diffusion and feedback from protostellar outflows. The calculations focus on relatively diffuse clouds threaded by a…

The past decade has seen an increase of star formation studies made at the molecular cloud scale, motivated mostly by the deployment of a wealth of sensitive infrared telescopes and instruments. Embedded clusters, long recognised as the…

We discuss the role of turbulence in cloud and star formation, as observed in numerical simulations of the interstellar medium. Turbulent compression at the interfaces of colliding gas streams is responsible for the formation of…

We investigate the physical properties of dense cores formed in turbulent, magnetized, parsec-scale clumps of molecular clouds, using three-dimensional numerical simulations that include protostellar outflow feedback. The dense cores are…

We investigate the formation of both clustered and distributed populations of young stars in a single molecular cloud. We present a numerical simulation of a 10,000 solar mass elongated, turbulent, molecular cloud and the formation of over…

Star formation is a fundamental process for galactic evolution. One issue over the last several decades has been determining whether star formation is induced by external triggers or is self-regulated in a closed system. The role of an…