Related papers: A ram-pressure threshold for star formation
The importance of radiation pressure feedback in galaxy formation has been extensively debated over the last decade. The regime of greatest uncertainty is in the most actively star-forming galaxies, where large dust columns can potentially…
Early type massive stars drive thin, dense shells whose edges often show evidence of star-formation. The possibility of fragmentation of these shells, leading to the formation of putative star-forming clumps is examined with the aid of…
It is now widely accepted that dense filaments of molecular gas are integral to the process of stellar birth. While numerical simulations have succeeded in reproducing filamentary structure in turbulent gas and analytic calculations have…
We report results from numerical simulations of star formation in the early universe that focus on gas at very high densities and very low metallicities. We argue that the gas in the central regions of protogalactic halos will fragment as…
Star formation is enhanced in spiral arms because of a combination of orbit crowding, cloud collisions, and gravitational instabilities. The characteristic mass for the instability is 10^7 Msun in gas and 10^5 Msun in stars, and the…
We investigate the influence of ram-pressure stripping on the star formation and the mass distribution in simulated spiral galaxies. Special emphasis is put on the question where the newly formed stars are located. The stripping radius from…
Stars form when filaments and dense cores in molecular clouds fragment and collapse due to self-gravity. In the most basic analyses of gravitational stability, the competition between self-gravity and thermal pressure sets the critical…
The process of star formation from metal-free gas is investigated by following the evolution of accreting protostars with emphasis on the properties of massive objects. The main aim is to establish the physical processes that determine the…
We review the main results from recent numerical simulations of turbulent fragmentation and star formation. Specifically, we discuss the observed scaling relationships, the ``quiescent'' (subsonic) nature of many star-forming cores, their…
The first stars are known to form in primordial gas, either in minihalos with about $10^6$~M$_\odot$ or so-called atomic cooling halos of about $10^8$~M$_\odot$. Simulations have shown that gravitational collapse and disk formation in…
We discuss the factors influencing the formation and gravitational fragmentation of protostellar discs. We start with a review of how observations of prestellar cores can be analysed statistically to yield plausible initial conditions for…
We study the evolution of supernova remnants in a low-metallicity medium $Z/Z_{\odot} = 10^{-4}$ -- $10^{-2}$ in the early universe, using one-dimensional hydrodynamics with non-equilibrium chemistry. Once a post-shock layer is able to cool…
Circumstellar disks are an essential ingredient of the formation of low-mass stars. It is unclear, however, whether the accretion-disk paradigm can also account for the formation of stars more massive than about 10 solar masses, in which…
Sufficiently massive clumps of molecular gas collapse under self-gravity and fragment to spawn a cluster of stars that have a range of masses. We investigate observationally the early stages of formation of a stellar cluster in a massive…
The mechanisms which could lead to chemo-thermal instabilities and fragmentation during the formation of primordial protostars are investigated analytically. We introduce approximations for H2 cooling rates bridging the optically thin and…
The collapse of dense cores with different metallicities is studied by hydrodynamical calculations coupled with detailed chemical and radiative processes. For this purpose, we construct a simple chemical network with non-equilibrium…
Conditions for the fragmentation of expanding shells due to gravitational instability are discussed. The self-similar analytical solution is compared with the results of 3-dimensional computer simulations for the expansion into homogeneous…
The star formation rate in galaxies should be related to the fraction of gas that can attain densities large enough for gravitational collapse. In galaxies with a turbulent interstellar medium, this fraction is controlled by the effective…
The observed rapid onset of star formation in molecular clouds requires rapid formation of dense fragments which can collapse individually before being overtaken by global gravitationally-driven flows. Many previous investigations have…
We discuss fragmentation processes which induce star formation in dense walls of expanding shells. The influence of the energy input, the ISM scale-height and speed of sound in the ambient medium is tested. We formulate the condition for…