Related papers: A law for star formation in galaxies
The processes regulating star formation in galaxies are thought to act across a hierarchy of spatial scales. To connect extragalactic star formation relations from global and kpc-scale measurements to recent cloud-scale resolution studies,…
I review theoretical models of star formation and how they apply across the stellar mass spectrum. Several distinct theories are under active study for massive star formation, especially Turbulent Core Accretion, Competitive Accretion and…
We model the formation of high-mass stars, specifying the accretion rate in terms of the instantaneous and final mass of the star, the ambient pressure of the star-forming region and the form of polytropic pressure support of the…
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…
During the last two decades, the focus of star formation research has shifted from understanding the collapse of a single dense core into a star to studying the formation hundreds to thousands of stars in molecular clouds. In this chapter,…
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…
We present a model that explains why galaxies form stars on a time scale significantly longer than the time scales of processes governing the evolution of interstellar gas. We show that gas evolves from a non-star-forming to a star-forming…
Most stars form in highly clustered environments within molecular clouds, but eventually disperse into the distributed stellar field population. Exactly how the stellar distribution evolves from the embedded stage into gas-free associations…
Gravitational instabilities play a primary role in shaping the clumpy structure and powering the star formation activity of gas-rich high-redshift galaxies. Here we analyse the stability of such systems, focusing on the size and mass ranges…
Stars form when filaments and dense cores in molecular clouds fragment and collapse due to self-gravity. In the most basic analyses of gravitational stability, the competition between self-gravity and thermal pressure sets the critical…
We show that massive stars and stellar clusters are formed simultaneously, the global evolution of the forming cluster is what allows the central stars to become massive. We predict that massive star forming clumps, such as those observed…
Recently, we have shown that if the ISM is governed by super-sonic turbulent flows, the excursion-set formalism can be used to calculate the statistics of self-gravitating objects over a wide range of scales. On the largest self-gravitating…
The timescale for star formation, a measure of how quickly neutral gas is being converted to stars, is considerably longer than typical dynamical timescales associated with a galactic disk. For purposes of modeling galaxy evolution,…
We present a simple model for the number distribution of maximally star-forming clumps in rotating disk galaxies, at high-$z$ with high gas surface densities. By combining assumptions surrounding marginal stability of disks against…
I review observational studies of the large-scale star formation process in nearby galaxies. A wealth of new multi-wavelength data provide an unprecedented view on the interplay of the interstellar medium and (young) stellar populations on…
We use a suite of 3D simulations of star-forming molecular clouds, with and without stellar feedback, magnetic fields, and driven turbulence, to study the compression and expansion rates of the gas as functions of density. We show that,…
Feedback from massive stars is believed to play a critical role in shaping the galaxy mass function, the structure of the interstellar medium (ISM), and the low efficiency of star formation, but the exact form of the feedback is uncertain.…
Due to their low gravitational energies, dwarf galaxies are greatly exposed to energetical influences from internal and external sources. By means of chemodynamical models we show that their star formation is inherently self-regulated, that…
The conditions required for massive star formation are debated, particularly whether massive stars must form in conjunction with massive clusters. Some authors have advanced the view that stars of any mass (below the total cluster mass) can…
Self-gravity and stellar feedback are capable of driving turbulence and transporting mass and angular momentum in disk galaxies, but the balance between them is not well understood. In the previous paper in this series, we showed that…