Related papers: Inflows in massive star formation regions
The formation of massive stars in close binary systems is complicated due to their high radiation pressure, the crowded environment and the expected minimum separation for fragmentation being many times greater than the orbital separation.…
Star formation is a multi-scale, multi-physics problem ranging from the size scale of molecular clouds ($\sim$10s pc) down to the size scales of dense prestellar cores ($\sim$0.1 pc) that are the birth sites of stars. Several physical…
In the earliest phases of their evolution, stars gain mass through the acquisition of matter from their birth clouds. The widely accepted classical concept of early stellar evolution neglects the details of this accretion phase and assumes…
Supermassive black holes are not only common in the present-day galaxies, but billion solar masses black holes also powered $z\geq 6$ quasars. One efficient way to form such black holes is the collapse of a massive primordial gas cloud into…
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…
Gas infall and accretion play a fundamental role in galaxy formation, and several processes of accretion are reviewed. In particular the cold accretion may solve to some extent the angular momentum problem in disk formation, while it is…
Understanding star formation is problematic as it originates in the large scale dynamics of a galaxy but occurs on the small scale of an individual star forming event. This paper presents the first numerical simulations to resolve the star…
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…
Massive stars form in clusters within self-gravitating molecular clouds. The size scale of these clusters is sufficiently large that non-thermal, or turbulent, motions of the gas must be taken into account when considering their formation.…
Cloud contraction and infall are the fundamental processes of star formation. While "blue-skewed" line profiles observed in high- mass star forming regions are commonly taken as evidence of infall by an ever increasing number of studies,…
Massive stars likely form by accretion and the evolutionary track of an accreting forming star corresponds to what is called the birthline in the HR diagram. The shape of this birthline is quite sensitive to the evolution of the entropy in…
Understanding the processes that determine the stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF) is a critical unsolved problem, with profound implications for many areas of astrophysics. In molecular clouds, stars are formed in cores, gas condensations…
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…
Observations suggest that star formation occurs in only one or two crossing times for a range of scales spanning a factor of 1000. These observations include (1) measurements of embedded cluster ages in comparison with the cloud core…
Herschel has opened new windows into studying the evolution of rapidly star-forming galaxies out to high redshifts. Today's massive starbursts are characterized by star formation rates (SFRs) of 100+ Mo/yr and display a chaotic morphology…
Stars with masses of >~ 20 solar masses have short Kelvin times that enable them to reach the main sequence while still accreting from their natal clouds. The resulting nuclear burning produces a huge luminosity and a correspondingly large…
We investigate the triggering of star formation and the formation of stellar clusters in molecular clouds that form as the ISM passes through spiral shocks. The spiral shock compresses gas into $\sim$100 pc long main star formation ridge,…
Massive stars have a profound influence on the Universe, but their formation remains poorly understood. We review the current status of observational and theoretical research in this field, describing the various stages of an evolutionary…
High resolution X-ray spectra reveal hidden cooling flows depositing cold gas at the centres of massive nearby early-type galaxies with little sign of normal star formation. Optical observations are revealing that a bottom-heavy Initial…
There are now two dominant models of how stars form: gravitational collapse theory holds that star-forming molecular clumps, typically hundreds to thousands of solar masses in mass, fragment into gaseous cores that subsequently collapse to…