Related papers: Characteristic structure of star-forming clouds
The formation of massive stars is a highly complex process in which it is not clear whether the star-forming gas is in global gravitational collapse or in an equilibrium state, supported by turbulence. By studying one of the most massive…
The thermal properties of star-forming clouds have an important influence on how they fragment into stars, and it is suggested in this paper that the low-mass stellar IMF, which appears to be almost universal, is determined largely by the…
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…
Cloud-cloud collisions are expected to trigger star formation by compressing gas into dense, gravitationally unstable regions. However, the role of magnetic fields in this process is unclear. We use SPH to model head-on collisions between…
Continuum observations of molecular clouds have revealed a surprising amount of substructure in the form of filaments of a few pc length and cores of ~0.1 pc diameter. Understanding the evolution of these substructures towards star…
Aims: We resolve the length-scales for filament formation and fragmentation (res. <=0.1pc), in particular the Jeans length and cylinder fragmentation scale. Methods: We observed the prototypical high-mass star-forming filament IRDC18223…
The star formation efficiency (SFE) measures the proportion of molecular gas converted into stars, while the star formation rate (SFR) indicates the rate at which gas is transformed into stars. Here we propose such a model in the framework…
Volume and column density PDFs in molecular clouds are important diagnostics for understanding their general structure. We developed a novel approach to trace the cloud structure by varying the lower PDF cut-off and exploring a suggested…
We examine the linear stability of a filamentary cloud permeated by a perpendicular magnetic field. The initial magnetic field is assumed to be uniform and perpendicular to the cloud axis. The model cloud is assumed to have a Plummer-like…
We have used deep near-infrared observations with adaptive optics to discover a distributed population of low-mass protostars within the filamentary Infrared Dark Cloud G34.43+00.24. We use maps of dust emission at multiple wavelengths to…
A self-similar formalism for the study of the gravitational collapse of molecular gas provides an important theoretical framework from which to explore the dynamics of star formation. Motivated by the presence of elongated and filamentary…
Star formation is known to occur more readily where more raw materials are available. This is often expressed by a 'Kennicutt-Schmidt' relation where the surface density of Young Stellar Objects (YSOs) is proportional to column density to…
To complement the optical absorption-line survey of diffuse molecular gas in Paper I, we obtained and analyzed far ultraviolet H$_2$ and CO data on lines of sight toward stars in Cep OB2 and Cep OB3. Possible correlations between column…
We present PPMAP, a Bayesian procedure that uses images of dust continuum emission at multiple wavelengths to produce resolution-enhanced image cubes of differential column-density as a function of dust temperature and position. PPMAP is…
Filaments are an ubiquitous feature of molecular clouds, and appear to play a critical role in assembling the material to form stars. The dominant filaments are observed to have a rather narrow range of widths around $\sim 0.1$ pc, and to…
Hub-filament systems (HFSs) are potential sites of formation of star clusters and high mass stars. To understand the HFSs and to provide observational constraints on current theories that attempt to explainstar formation globally, we report…
Context. Low-mass star-forming cores differ from their surrounding molecular cloud in turbulence, shape, and density structure. Aims. We aim to understand how dense cores form out of the less dense cloud material by studying the connection…
The proper characterization of the general statistical behavior of these fluctuations, from a limited sample of observations or simulations, is of prime importance to understand the process of star formation. In this article, we use the…
In the past decade filaments have been recognised as a major structural element of the interstellar medium, the densest of these filaments hosting the formation of most stars. In some star-forming molecular clouds converging networks of…
The evolution of molecular interstellar clouds is a complex, multi-scale process. The power-law density exponent describes the steepness of density profiles, and it has been used to characterize the density structures of the clouds yet its…