Related papers: Interstellar filaments and star formation
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…
Young stars form on a wide range of scales, producing aggregates and clusters with various degrees of gravitational self-binding. The loose aggregates have a hierarchical structure in both space and time that resembles interstellar…
Star formation in strongly self-gravitating cloud cores should be similar at all redshifts, forming single or multiple stars with a range of masses determined by local magneto-hydrodynamics and gravity. The formation processes for these…
Star formation in galaxies is regulated by the heating and cooling in the interstellar medium. In particular, the processing of molecular gas into stars will depend strongly on the ratio of gas heating to gas cooling in the neutral gas…
The trending term "filament" is extensively used in the interstellar medium (ISM) and the star formation community, and is believed to be one of the most important objects that gauge molecular cloud and star formation. However, the physical…
Supersonic turbulence is an essential element in understanding how structure within interstellar gas is created and shaped. In the context of star formation, many computational studies show that the mass spectrum of density and velocity…
We review recent high spatial resolution millimeter continuum and spectral line observations of (proto-)cluster regions. These observations reveal that the mass distribution of prestellar cores is consistent with the initial mass function…
The interstellar medium (ISM) is a very complex medium which contains the matter needed to form stars and planets. The ISM is in permanent interaction with radiation, turbulence, magnetic and gravitational fields, and accelerated particles.…
Filamentary structures are ubiquitous from large-scale molecular clouds (few parsecs) to small-scale circumstellar envelopes around Class 0 sources (~1000 AU to ~0.1 pc). In particular, recent observations with the Herschel Space…
Infrared-dark clouds (IRDCs) are the precursors to massive stars and stellar clusters. G011.11-0.12 is a well-studied filamentary IRDC, though, to date, the absence of far-infrared data with sufficient spatial resolution has limited the…
Herschel observations of nearby clouds in the Gould Belt support a paradigm for low-mass star formation, starting with the generation of molecular filaments, followed by filament fragmentation, and the concentration of mass into…
(Abridged) In this paper, we present analyses of images taken with the Herschel ESA satellite from 70mu to 500mu. We first constructed column density and dust temperature maps. Next, we identified compact cores in the maps, and characterize…
Using studies of nearby star formation with Spitzer, I will argue that star formation is restricted to dense cores within molecular clouds. The nature of these dense cores and their connection to star formation will be discussed. Their…
Star clusters form in dense, hierarchically collapsing gas clouds. Bulk kinetic energy is transformed to turbulence with stars forming from cores fed by filaments. In the most compact regions, stellar feedback is least effective in removing…
The inner few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way harbours gas densities, pressures, velocity dispersions, an interstellar radiation field and a cosmic ray ionisation rate orders of magnitude higher than the disc; akin to the environment found…
Filaments are crucial intermediaries in the star formation process. Recent observations of filaments show that - \textbf{(i)} a number of them are non-singular entities, and rather a bundle of velocity coherent fibres, and \textbf{(ii)}…
The cycling of material from the interstellar medium (ISM) into stars and the return of stellar ejecta into the ISM is the engine that drives the "galactic ecology" in normal spirals, a cornerstone in the formation and evolution of galaxies…
Observations of both star-forming regions and young, gas-free stellar associations indicate that most nearby molecular clouds form stars only over a short time span before dispersal; large-scale flows in the diffuse interstellar medium have…
During the last two decades, the focus of star formation research has shifted from understanding the collapse of a single dense core into a star to studying the formation hundreds to thousands of stars in molecular clouds. In this chapter,…
In star forming regions, we can observe different evolutionary stages of various objects and phenomena such as molecular clouds, protostellar jets and outflows, circumstellar disks, and protostars. However, it is difficult to directly…