Related papers: Testing Magnetic Star Formation Theory
We present the largest sample of high-mass star-forming regions observed using submillimetre imaging polarimetry. The data were taken using SCUBA in conjunction with the polarimeter on the JCMT in Hawaii. In total, 16 star forming regions…
Ambipolar diffusion likely plays a pivotal role in the formation and evolution of dense cores in weakly-ionized molecular clouds. Linear analyses show that the evolutionary times and fragmentation scales are significantly greater than the…
Observational data for the hourglass-like magnetic field toward the starless dense core FeSt 1-457 were compared with a flux freezing magnetic field model (Myers et al. 2018). Fitting of the observed plane-of-sky magnetic field using the…
Observations indicate that dense molecular filamentary clouds are sites of star formation. The filament width determines the most unstable scale for self-gravitational fragmentation and influences the stellar mass. Therefore, constraining…
We demonstrate that the formation of collapsing cores in subcritical clouds is accelerated by nonlinear flows, by performing three-dimensional non-ideal MHD simulations. An initial random supersonic (and trans-Alfvenic) turbulent-like flow…
Theoretically, stars have been formed from the collapse of cores in the molecular clouds. Historically, the core had been assumed as an singular isothermal sphere (SIS), and the collapse had been investigated by a self-similar manner. This…
Magnetic Clouds (MCs) are a particular subset of Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejections (ICMEs), forming large scale magnetic flux ropes. In this work we analyze the evolution of a particular MC (observed on March 1998) using {\it in situ}…
We investigate the role of ambipolar diffusion (AD) in collisions between magnetized giant molecular clouds (GMCs), which may be an important mechanism for triggering star cluster formation. Three dimensional simulations of GMC collisions…
Supersonic random motions are observed in dark clouds and are traditionally interpreted as Alfven waves, but the possibility that these motions are super-Alfvenic has not been ruled out. In this work we report the results of numerical…
Using recent dust continuum data, we generate the intrinsic ellipticity distribution of dense, starless molecular cloud cores. Under the hypothesis that the cores are all either oblate or prolate randomly-oriented spheroids, we show that a…
In the standard picture of isolated star formation, dense ``starless'' cores are formed out of magnetic molecular clouds due to ambipolar diffusion. Under the simplest spherical geometry, I demonstrate that ``starless'' cores formed this…
The rotating magnetic B stars have oblique dipolar magnetic fields and often anomalous helium and metallic compositions. These stars develop co-rotating torus-shaped clouds by channelling winds from their magnetic poles to an anchored…
We aim to understand the formation of dense cores by magnetosonic waves in regions where the thermal to magnetic pressure ratio is small. Because of the low-ionisation fraction in molecular clouds, neutral and charged particles are weakly…
We clarify the mechanism of accelerated core formation by large-scale nonlinear flows in subcritical magnetic clouds by finding a semi-analytical formula for the core formation time and describing the physical processes that lead to them.…
We show that the ambipolar-diffusion--initiated fragmentation of molecular clouds leads simply and naturally to an initial core mass function (CMF) which is very similar to the initial stellar mass function (IMF) and in excellent agreement…
(Edited for length) The Zeeman effect is the only observational technique available to measure directly the strength of magnetic fields in regions of star formation. We review the physics of the Zeeman effect and its practical use in both…
We had recently re-analyzed in a self-consistent way OH-Zeeman observations in four molecular-cloud envelopes and we had shown that, contrary to claims by Crutcher et al., there is no evidence that the mass-to-flux ratio decreases from the…
The formation of stars is governed by the intricate interplay of nonideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) effects, gravity, and turbulence. Computational challenges have hindered a comprehensive 3D exploration of this interplay, posing a…
This paper re-examines the problem of ambipolar diffusion as a mechanism for the production and runaway evolution of centrally condensed molecular cloud cores, a process that has been termed the gravomagneto catastrophe. Our calculation…
We perform ideal MHD high resolution AMR simulations with driven turbulence and self-gravity and find that long filamentary molecular clouds are formed at the converging locations of large-scale turbulence flows and the filaments are…