Related papers: A hot compact dust disk around a massive young ste…
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…
The recent detection of planets around very low mass stars raises the question of the formation, composition and potential habitability of these objects. We use planetary system formation models to infer the properties, in particular their…
We propose a scenario in which massive stars form in a self-gravitating gaseous disc around a supermassive black hole. We find that once the surface density of the disc exceeds a critical value, the disc fragments into dense clumps. The…
The extreme outer regions of disk galaxies, lying at or beyond the classical optical radius defined by R25, present an opportunity to study star formation and chemical evolution under unique physical conditions, possibly reminscent of those…
The formation of supermassive stars is believed to be an essential intermediate step for the formation of the massive black hole seeds that become the supermassive black holes powering the quasars observed in the early Universe. Numerical…
We use FIRE simulations to study disk formation in z~0, Milky Way-mass galaxies, and conclude that a key ingredient for the formation of thin stellar disks is the ability for accreting gas to develop an aligned angular momentum distribution…
Circumstellar disks are characteristic for star formation and vanish during the first few Myr of stellar evolution. During this time planets are believed to form in the dense midplane by growth, sedimentation and aggregation of dust.…
We analyze the dynamics of gas-dust coupling in the presence of stellar radiation pressure in circumstellar gas disks, which are in a transitional stage between the gas-dominated, optically thick, primordial nebulae, and the dust-dominated,…
We investigate the radiation pressure feedback in the formation of massive stars in 1, 2, and 3D radiation hydrodynamics simulations of the collapse of massive pre-stellar cores. In contrast to previous research, we consider frequency…
The discovery of hundreds of young, bright stars within a parsec from the massive black hole at the center of the Galaxy presents a challenge to star formation theories. The requisite Roche densities for the gravitational collapse of gas…
We present K-band polarimetric images of several massive young stellar objects at resolutions $\sim$ 0.1-0.5 arcsec. The polarization vectors around these sources are nearly centro-symmetric, indicating they are dominating the illumination…
In this work the most spectacular phenomena occurring during the formation of a star are briefly reviewed: accretion through a rotating disc of matter and outflow through the poles of the new stellar object. Magnetic fields have been…
The current generation of millimeter interferometers have revealed a population of compact (r <~ 0.1 pc), massive (M ~ 100 Msun) gas cores that are the likely progenitors of massive stars. I review models for the evolution of these objects…
We report on the first bird's-eye view of the innermost accretion disk around the high-mass protostellar object G353.273+0.641, taken by Atacama Large Millimter/submillimeter Array long-baselines. The disk traced by dust continuum emission…
Processes that promote the formation of dense cold clouds in the interstellar media of galaxies are reviewed. Those that involve background stellar mass include two-fluid instabilities, spiral density wave shocking, and bar accretion. Young…
It is widely believed that star clusters form with low star formation efficiencies. With the onset of stellar winds by massive stars or finally when the first super nova blows off, the residual gas is driven out of the embedded star…
Our understanding of population III star formation is still in its infancy. They are formed in dark matter minihalos of $\rm 10^5-10^6 M_{\odot}$ at $z=20-30$. Recent high resolution cosmological simulations show that a protostellar disk…
The physical structure of the envelopes around a sample of fourteen massive (1000-100,000 solar L) young stars is investigated on 100- 100,000 AU scales using maps and spectra in submillimeter continuum and lines of C17O, CS and H2CO. The…
The birth process of circumstellar disks remains poorly constrained due to observational and numerical challenges. Recent numerical works have shown that the small-scale physics, often wrapped into a sub-grid model, play a crucial role in…
We present a model for the formation of high-mass close binary systems in the context of forming massive stars through gas accretion in the centres of stellar clusters. A low-mass wide binary evolves under mass accretion towards a high-mass…