Related papers: Forming isolated brown dwarfs by turbulent fragmen…

We explore the possibility that, in the vicinity of an OB star, a prestellar core which would otherwise have formed an intermediate or low-mass star may form a free-floating brown dwarf or planetary-mass object, because the outer layers of…

Context: The principal mechanism by which brown dwarfs form, and its relation to the formation of higher-mass (i.e. hydrogen-burning) stars, is poorly understood. Aims: We advocate a new model for the formation of brown dwarfs. Methods: In…

We review five mechanisms for forming brown dwarfs: (i) turbulent fragmentation of molecular clouds, producing very low-mass prestellar cores by shock compression; (ii) collapse and fragmentation of more massive prestellar cores; (iii) disc…

We present results from the first hydrodynamical star formation calculation to demonstrate that brown dwarfs are a natural and frequent product of the collapse and fragmentation of a turbulent molecular cloud. The brown dwarfs form via the…

We suggest that low-mass hydrogen-burning stars like the Sun should sometimes form with massive extended discs; and we show, by means of radiation hydrodynamic simulations, that the outer parts of such discs (R>100 AU) are likely to…

We review four mechanisms for forming brown dwarfs: (i) turbulent fragmentation (producing very low-mass prestellar cores); (ii) gravitational instabilities in discs; (iii) dynamical ejection of stellar embryos from their placental cores;…

The formation of brown dwarfs (BDs) poses a key challenge to star formation theory. The observed dearth of nearby ($\leq 5$ AU) brown dwarf companions to solar-mass stars, known as the brown dwarf desert, as well as the tendency for…

We have simulated star formation in prestellar cores, using SPH and initial conditions informed by observations of the cores in Ophiuchus. Because the observations are limited to two spatial dimensions plus radial velocity, we cannot infer…

The formation of brown dwarfs (BDs) due to the fragmentation of proto-stellar disks undergoing pairwise encounters was investigated. High resolution allowed the use of realistic initial disk models where both the vertical structure and the…

It is not known whether brown dwarfs (stellar-like objects with masses less than the hydrogen-burning limit, 0.075 Msun) are formed in the same way as solar-type stars or by some other process. Here we report the clear-cut identification of…

We investigate the formation of brown dwarfs and very low-mass stars through the gravitational fragmentation of infalling gas into stellar clusters. The gravitational potential of a forming stellar cluster provides the focus that attracts…

We review the current state of observational work on the formation of brown dwarfs, focusing on their initial mass function, velocity and spatial distributions at birth, multiplicity, accretion, and circumstellar disks. The available…

It is estimated that ~60% of all stars (including brown dwarfs) have masses below 0.2Msun. Currently, there is no consensus on how these objects form. I will briefly review the four main theories for the formation of low-mass objects:…

The observational properties of brown dwarfs pose challenges to the theory of star formation. Because their mass is much smaller than the typical Jeans mass of interstellar clouds, brown dwarfs are most likely formed through secondary…

Our first aim is to calculate the minimum mass for Primary Fragmentation in a variety of potential star-formation scenarios, i.e. (i) hierarchical fragmentation of a 3-D medium; (ii) one-shot, 2-D fragmentation of a shock-compressed layer;…

The formation scenario of brown dwarfs is still unclear because observational studies to investigate its initial condition are quite limited. Our systematic survey of nearby low-mass star-forming regions using the Atacama Compact Array (aka…

We suggest that a high proportion of brown dwarfs are formed by gravitational fragmentation of massive, extended discs around Sun-like stars. We argue that such discs should arise frequently, but should be observed infrequently, precisely…

We perform SPH simulations of the collapse and fragmentation of low-mass cores having different initial levels of turbulence (alpha_turb=0.05,0.10,0.25). We use a new treatment of the energy equation which captures the transport of cooling…

Isolated low-mass stars are formed, in the standard picture, from the collapse of dense cores condensed out of strongly magnetized molecular clouds. The dynamically collapsing inflow traps nearly half of the critical magnetic flux needed…

The formation mechanism of brown dwarfs (BDs) is one of the long-standing problems in star formation because the typical Jeans mass in molecular clouds is too large to form these substellar objects. To answer this question, it is crucial to…