Related papers: Classification of the Circumstellar Disk Evolution…
The last decade has witnessed significant advances in our observational understanding of the earliest stages of low-mass star formation. The advent of sensitive receivers on large radio telescopes such as the JCMT and IRAM 30m MRT has led…
Observations indicate that massive stars form in regions of very high surface density, ~1 g cm^-2. Clusters containing massive stars and globular clusters have a comparable column density. The total pressure in clouds of such a column…
The physical conditions in a collapsing cloud can be traced by observations of molecular lines. To correctly interpret these observations the abundance distributions of the observed species need to be derived. The chemistry in a collapsing…
The thermodynamical evolution of gas during the collapse of the primordial star-forming cloud depends significantly on the initial degree of rotation. However, there is no clear understanding of how the initial rotation can affect the…
Self-gravitating protostellar discs are unstable to fragmentation if the gas can cool on a time scale that is short compared to the orbital period. We use a combination of hydrodynamic simulations and N-body orbit integrations to study the…
We present the first coherent dynamical study of the cloud fragmentation-phase, collapse and early stellar evolution of a solar mass star. We determine young star properties as the consequence of the parent cloud evolution. Mass, luminosity…
Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams of star forming regions show a large luminosity spread. This is incompatible with well-defined isochrones based on classic non-accreting protostellar evo- lution models. Protostars do not evolve in isolation of…
We model gas inflow patterns onto circumstellar disks and the evolution of the pseudodisk using three-dimensional resistive MHD simulations. Starting from a prestellar core without turbulence and with a misalignment between the initial…
We explore the origin of the rotation rates of massive stars. Contrary to their low-mass siblings, most massive stars do not have detectable magnetic fields, so that star-disk interaction models used for the formation of rotating low-mass…
A new view of disk evolution is emerging from self-consistent numerical simulation modeling of the formation of circumstellar disks from the direct collapse of prestellar cloud cores. This has implications for many aspects of star and…
We investigate the impact of different initial conditions for the initial density profile and the initial turbulence on the formation process of protostellar clusters. We study the collapse of dense molecula r cloud cores with…
We review the properties of low mass dense molecular cloud cores, including starless, prestellar, and Class 0 protostellar cores, as derived from observations. In particular we discuss them in the context of the current debate surrounding…
Low-mass protostars may accrete most of their material through short-lived episodes of rapid disk accretion; yet until recently evolutionary tracks for these protostars assumed only constant or slowly-varying accretion. Important initial…
The collapse of dense cores with different metallicities is studied by hydrodynamical calculations coupled with detailed chemical and radiative processes. For this purpose, we construct a simple chemical network with non-equilibrium…
We investigate the thermal and dynamical evolution of primordial gas clouds in the universe after decoupling. Comparing the time-scale of dynamical evolution with that of fragmentation, we can estimate the typical fragmentation scale. We…
Recent advances in our understanding of massive star formation have made clear the important role of protostellar disks in mediating accretion. Here we describe a simple, semi-analytic model for young, deeply embedded, massive accretion…
We present an idealized, spherical model of the evolution of a magnetized molecular cloud due to ambipolar diffusion. This model allows us to follow the quasi-static evolution of the cloud's core prior to collapse and the subsequent…
We present radiation hydrodynamic simulations of collapsing protostellar cores with initial masses of 30, 100, and 200 M$_{\odot}$. We follow their gravitational collapse and the formation of a massive protostar and protostellar accretion…
Context. Current models of the size- and radial evolution of dust in protoplanetary disks generally oversimplify either the radial evolution of the disk (by focussing at one single radius or by using steady state disk models) or they assume…
Context: The global size and spatial distribution of dust is an important ingredient in the structure and evolution of protoplanetary disks and in the formation of larger bodies, such as planetesimals. Aims: We aim to derive simple…