Related papers: Star Formation at the Galactic Center
The inner few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way harbours gas densities, pressures, velocity dispersions, an interstellar radiation field and a cosmic ray ionisation rate orders of magnitude higher than the disc; akin to the environment found…
In recent years, the Galactic Center (GC) region (200 pc in radius) has been studied in detail with spectroscopic stellar data as well as an estimate of the ongoing star formation rate. The aims of this paper are to study the chemical…
Statistical sampling from the stellar initial mass function (IMF) for all star-forming regions in the Galaxy would lead to the prediction of ~1000 Msun stars unless there is a rapid turn-down in the IMF beyond several hundred solar masses.…
We first present chemodynamical simulations to investigate how stellar winds of massive stars influence early dynamical and chemical evolution of forming globular clusters (GCs). In our numerical models, GCs form in turbulent,high-density…
Stars are forming in our galaxy at a rate of between 1 and 4 solar masses of stars per year. In contrast to elliptical galaxies, which are largely devoid of star formation, star formation is still going on in spiral galaxies because of…
Here we model a star forming factory in which the continuous creation of stars results in a highly concentrated, massive (globular cluster-like) stellar system. We show that under very general conditions a large-scale gravitational…
Understanding the origin of stellar masses is a key problem in astrophysics. In the solar neighborhood, the mass distribution of stars follows a seemingly universal pattern. In the centre of the Milky Way, however, there are indications for…
We investigate the triggering of star formation in clouds that form in Galactic scale flows as the ISM passes through spiral shocks. We use the Lagrangian nature of SPH simulations to trace how the star forming gas is gathered into…
(abridged) Here we discuss the question whether the extreme circumstances in the centre of the Milky Way may be the reason for a significant variation of the IMF. By means of stellar evolution models using different codes we show that the…
A stochastic model of fragmentation of molecular clouds has been developed for studying the resulting Initial Mass Function (IMF) where the number of fragments, inter-occurrence time of fragmentation, masses and velocities of the fragments…
The initial mass function (IMF) is an essential tool with which to study star formation processes. We have initiated the photometric survey of young open clusters in the Galaxy, from which the stellar IMFs are obtained in a homogeneous way.…
All stars are born in molecular clouds, and most in giant molecular clouds (GMCs), which thus set the star formation activity of galaxies. We first review their observed properties, including measures of mass surface density, Sigma, and…
The conditions that affect the formation of stars in radiatively and mechanically active environments are quite different than the conditions that apply to our local interstellar neighborhood. In such galactic environments, a variety of…
The origin of the stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF) and how it may vary with galactic environment is a matter of debate. Certain star formation theories involve a close connection between the IMF and the Core Mass Function (CMF) so it is…
Over the past years observations of young and populous star clusters have shown that the stellar IMF appears to be an invariant featureless Salpeter power-law with an exponent alpha=2.35 for stars more massive than a few Msun. A consensus…
Observed variations in the slope of the initial stellar mass function are shown to be consistent with a model in which the protostellar gas is randomly sampled from hierarchical clouds at a rate proportional to the square root of the local…
The stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF) seems to be close to universal in the local star-forming regions. However, this quantity of a newborn stellar population responds differently at gas metallicities $Z \sim$ $Z_\odot$ than $Z$ = 0. A…
The conversion of gas into stars is a fundamental process in astrophysics and cosmology. Stars are known to form from the gravitational collapse of dense clumps in interstellar molecular clouds, and it has been proposed that the resulting…
We derive a semi-empirical galactic initial mass function (IMF) from observational constraints. We assume that the star formation rate in a galaxy can be expressed as the product of the IMF, $\psi (m)$, which is a smooth function of mass…
Using a new physical model for star formation (Padoan 1995) we have tested the possibility that globular clusters (GCs) are formed from primordial mass fluctuations, whose mass scale ($10^8$ - $10^9$ M$_{\odot}$) is selected out of a CDM…