Related papers: A Density Dependence for Protostellar Luminosity i…
Motivated by the long-standing "luminosity problem" in low-mass star formation whereby protostars are underluminous compared to theoretical expectations, we identify 230 protostars in 18 molecular clouds observed by two Spitzer Space…
Accretion and ejection sets the outcome of the star and planet formation process. The mid-infrared wavelength range offers key tracers of those processes that were difficult to detect and spatially resolve in protostars until now. We aim to…
Context. Molecular clouds near the H II regions tend to harbor more luminous protostars. Aims. Our aim in this paper is to investigate whether or not radiation-driven implosion mechanism enhances luminosity of protostars near regions of…
Star formation is intimately linked to the dynamical evolution of molecular clouds. Turbulent fragmentation determines where and when protostellar cores form, and how they contract and grow in mass via accretion from the surrounding cloud…
Stars form from the gravitational collapse of dense molecular cloud cores. In the protostellar phase, mass accretes from the core onto a protostar, likely through an accretion disk, and it is during this phase that the initial masses of…
In recent years a correlation between mass accretion rates onto new-born stars and their proto-planetary disc masses was detected in nearby young star-forming regions. Although such a correlation can be interpreted as due to…
Identifying the processes that determine strength, duration and variability of protostellar mass growth is a fundamental ingredient of any theory of star formation. I discuss protostellar mass accretion rates dM/dt from numerical models…
The mass growth of protostars is a central element to the determination of fundamental stellar population properties such as the initial mass function. Constraining the accretion history of individual protostars is therefore an important…
Observations have revealed prodigious amounts of star formation in starburst galaxies as traced by dust and molecular emission, even at large redshifts. Recent work shows that for both nearby spiral galaxies and distant starbursts, the…
We have surveyed 84 Class 0, Class I, and flat-spectrum protostars in mid-infrared [Si II], [Fe II] and [S I] line emission, and 11 of these in far-infrared [O I] emission. We use the results to derive their mass outflow rates. Thereby we…
We perform a large set of radiation hydrodynamics simulations of primordial star formation in a fully cosmological context. Our statistical sample of 100 First Stars show that the first generation of stars have a wide mass distribution…
Most protostars have luminosities that are fainter than expected from steady accretion over the protostellar lifetime. The solution to this problem may lie in episodic mass accretion -- prolonged periods of very low accretion punctuated by…
We present the Class I protostellar binary separation distribution based on the data tabulated in the companion paper. We verify the excess of Class I binary stars over solar-type main-sequence stars, especially at separations beyond 500…
A crucial question in galaxy formation is what role new accretion has in star formation. Theoretical models have predicted a wide range of correlation strengths between halo accretion and galaxy star formation. Previously, we presented a…
Massive star formation requires the accretion of gas at high rate while the star is already bright. Its actual luminosity depends sensitively on the stellar structure. We compute pre-main-sequence tracks for massive and intermediate-mass…
The mass of a protostar is calculated from the infall and dispersal of an isothermal sphere in a uniform background. For high contrast between peak and background densities and for short dispersal time t_d, the accretion is "self-limiting":…
The isothermal dynamical evolution of a clumpy and turbulent molecular cloud region and its fragmentation into a protostellar cluster is investigated numerically. The effect of different initial density and velocity distributions, generated…
We investigate the role of mass infall in the formation and evolution of protostars. To avoid ad hoc initial and boundary conditions, we consider the infall resulting self-consistently from modeling the formation of stellar clusters in…
I compare theoretical models of massive star formation with observations of the Orion Hot Core, which harbors one of the closest massive protostars. Although this region is complicated, many of its features (size, luminosity, accretion…
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…