Related papers: Star formation in infrared dark clouds: Self-gravi…
Galactic interstellar dust has a profound impact not only on our observations of objects throughout the Universe, but also on the morphology, star formation, and chemical evolution of the Galaxy. The advent of massive imaging and…
The past century of interstellar dust has brought us from first ignoring it to finding that it is an important component of the interstellar medium and plays an important role in the evolution of galaxies, the formation of stars and…
In recent years, there were studies on the omnipresence and structures of filaments in star-forming regions, and the role of their fragmentation in the process of star formation. However, only a few studies analysed the evolution of…
How molecular clouds fragment and create the dense structures which go on to form stars is an open question. We investigate the relative importance of different energy terms (kinetic, thermal, magnetic, and gravity - both self-gravity and…
Interstellar dust plays decisive roles in the conversion of neutral to molecular hydrogen (H_2), the thermodynamical evolution of interstellar medium (ISM), and the modification of spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of galaxies. These…
Star formation involves the flow of gas and dust within molecular clouds into protostars and young stellar objects (YSOs) due to gravity. Along the way, these flows are shaped significantly by many other mechanisms, including pressure,…
Interstellar dust is spread in galaxies over large scales, often far beyond the stellar disks. Several mechanisms can be responsible for carrying the dust both in the vertical and radial directions, producing in general different spatial…
Ices play a critical role during the evolution of interstellar clouds. Their presence is ubiquitous in the dense molecular medium and their impact is not only limited to chemistry. Species adsorbed onto dust grains also affect cloud…
We review current understanding of star formation, outlining an overall theoretical framework and the observations that motivate it. A conception of star formation has emerged in which turbulence plays a dual role, both creating…
In a new simple model I reconcile two contradictory views on the factors that determine the rate at which molecular clouds form stars -- internal structure vs. external, environmental influences -- providing a unified picture for the…
Empirical star formation laws from the last 20 years are reviewed with a comparison to simulations. The current form in main galaxy disks has a linear relationship between the star formation rate per unit area and the molecular cloud mass…
Molecular clouds, the birthplaces of stars in galaxies, form dynamically from the diffuse atomic gas of the interstellar medium (ISM). The ISM is also threaded by magnetic fields which have a large impact on its dynamics. In particular,…
Recent studies of the nearest star-forming clouds of the Galaxy at submillimeter wavelengths with the Herschel Space Observatory have provided us with unprecedented images of the initial conditions and early phases of the star formation…
We study numerically the formation of molecular clouds in large-scale colliding flows including self-gravity. The models emphasize the competition between the effects of gravity on global and local scales in an isolated cloud. Global…
In recent years it became clear that a population of galaxies radiating most of their power in the far-infrared contribute an important part of the whole star formation activity in the universe. These galaxies emit up to 99% of their energy…
(ABBREVIATED) Understanding the formation of stars in galaxies is central to much of modern astrophysics. In this review the relation between interstellar turbulence and star formation is discussed. Supersonic turbulence can provide support…
The empirical laws of star formation suggest that galactic-scale gravity is involved, but they do not identify the actual triggering mechanisms for clusters in the final stages. Many other triggering processes satisfy the empirical laws…
We review recent advances in the analytical and numerical modeling of the star formation rate in molecular clouds and discuss the available observational constraints. We focus on molecular clouds as the fundamental star formation sites,…
In these lectures I review observations of star-forming molecular clouds in our Galaxy and nearby galaxies to develop a physical intuition for understanding star formation in the local and high-redshift Universe. A lot of this material is…
While the concept of "clustering" primarily refers to galaxies, the fact is that galaxies can be neglected - at least in terms of mass - when considering the continuous competition between accretion and relaxation processes of dark matter…