Related papers: Accretion and Diffusion Timescales in Sheets and F…
It has been suggested that circumstellar disks evolve from dense, actively accreting structures to low-mass, replenished remnants. During this transition, grains may assemble into planetesimals, or the disk may be cleared by newborn…
Pebble accretion is a promising process for decreasing growth timescales of planetary cores, allowing gas giants to form at wide orbital separations. However, nebular turbulence can reduce the efficiency of this gas-assisted growth. We…
We discuss star formation in the turbulent interstellar medium. We argue that morphological appearance and dynamical evolution of the gas is primarily determined by supersonic turbulence, and that stars form via a process we call…
Stars may be assembled in large growth spurts, however the evidence for this hypothesis is circumstantial. Directly studying the accretion at the earliest phases of stellar growth is challenging because young stars are deeply embedded in…
In many cases accretion proceeds from disks onto planets, stars, white dwarfs, and neutron stars via a boundary layer, a region of intense shear where gas transitions from a near-Keplerian speed to that of the surface. These regions are…
We show how the mass function of dense cores (CMF) which results from the gravoturbulent fragmentation of a molecular cloud evolves in time under the effect of gas accretion. Accretion onto the cores leads to the formation of larger numbers…
Activity of the nuclei of galaxies and stellar mass systems involving disk accretion to black holes is thought to be due to (1) a small-scale turbulent magnetic field in the disk (due to the magneto-rotational instability or MRI) which…
We develop a semi-analytic model to investigate how accretion onto wide low-mass binary stars can result in a close high-mass binary system. The key ingredient is to allow mass accretion while limiting the gain in angular momentum. We…
In a previous paper we formulated the problem of the formation and evolution of fragments (or cores) in magnetically-supported, self-gravitating molecular clouds in axisymmetric geometry, accounting for the effects of ambipolar diffusion…
We describe an overall picture of galactic-scale star formation. Recent high-resolution magneto-hydrodynamical simulations of two-fluid dynamics with cooling/heating and thermal conduction have shown that the formation of molecular clouds…
The theory of radiatively-induced warps in accretion discs is applied to the discs of Be stars. It is found that these discs may develop warps in their inner regions, although once the warp amplitude is large enough then the interaction…
Until recently, many of the dozens of quantitative predictions of the ambipolar-diffusion theory of gravitational fragmentation (or core formation) of molecular clouds have been confirmed by observations and, just as importantly, no…
The transport of magnetic flux to outside of collapsing molecular clouds is a required step to allow the formation of stars. Although ambipolar diffusion is often regarded as a key mechanism for that, it has been recently argued that it may…
Massive stars (with mass m_* > 8 solar masses) are fundamental to the evolution of galaxies, because they produce heavy elements, inject energy into the interstellar medium, and possibly regulate the star formation rate. The individual star…
Scattering of stars by interstellar clouds or massive clumps increases the stellar velocity dispersion and promotes a radial disk profile that is exponential. Here we show that such scattering reaches a steady-state distribution function of…
We present a model for the formation of massive ($M > 10 M_\odot$) stars through accretion-induced collisions in the cores of embedded dense stellar clusters. This model circumvents the problem of accreting onto a star whose luminosity is…
We simulate fragmentation and gravitational collapse of cold, magnetized molecular clouds. We explore the nonlinear development of an instability mediated by ambipolar diffusion, in which the collapse rate is intermediate to fast…
We present virial models for the global evolution of giant molecular clouds. Focusing on the presence of an accretion flow, and accounting for the amount of mass, momentum, and energy supplied by accretion and star formation feedback, we…
Planets acquire atmospheres from their parent circumstellar disks. We derive a general analytic expression for how the atmospheric mass grows with time $t$, as a function of the underlying core mass $M_{\rm core}$ and nebular conditions,…
Isolated low-mass stars are formed in dense cores of molecular clouds. In the standard picture, the cores are envisioned to condense out of strongly magnetized clouds through ambipolar diffusion. Most previous calculations based on this…