Related papers: Variability of Deeply Embedded Protostars: A New D…
How a star forms is a fundamental question in astrophysics. In the earliest stages of protostellar evolution high extinction prevents a direct study of the accretion processes and their temporal evolution. Monitoring the variations of the…
Starting from a prestellar core with a size of $1.2\times10^4$ AU, we calculate the evolution of a gravitationally collapsing core until $\sim2000$ yr after protostar formation using a three-dimensional resistive magnetohydrodynamic…
The first stars fundamentally transformed the early universe by emitting the first light and by producing the first heavy elements. These effects were predetermined by the mass distribution of the first stars, which is thought to have been…
Protoplanetary disks are quasi-steady structures whose evolution and dispersal determine the environment for planet formation. I review the theory of protoplanetary disk evolution and its connection to observations. Substantial progress has…
The formation of supermassive stars is believed to be an essential intermediate step for the formation of the massive black hole seeds that become the supermassive black holes powering the quasars observed in the early Universe. Numerical…
I review theoretical models of star formation and how they apply across the stellar mass spectrum. Several distinct theories are under active study for massive star formation, especially Turbulent Core Accretion, Competitive Accretion and…
Recent high-resolution simulations demonstrate that disks around primordial protostars easily fragment in the accretion phase before the protostars accrete less than a solar mass. To understand why the gravitational instability generally…
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…
We calculate numerically the collapse of slowly rotating, non-magnetic, massive molecular clumps, which conceivably could lead to the formation of massive stars. Because radiative acceleration on dust grains plays a critical role in the…
We develop a semi-analytic formalism for the determination of the evolution of the stellar mass accretion rate for specified density and velocity profiles that emerge from the runaway collapse of a prestellar cloud core. In the early phase,…
The last decade has witnessed significant advances in our observational understanding of the earliest stages of low-mass star formation. The advent of sensitive receivers on large radio telescopes such as the JCMT and IRAM 30m MRT has led…
Observations indicate that massive stars form in regions of very high surface density, ~1 g cm^-2. Clusters containing massive stars and globular clusters have a comparable column density. The total pressure in clouds of such a column…
We perform calculations of pre-main sequence evolution of stars from 1 to $85 M_{\odot}$ with growing accretion rates $\dot{M}$. The values of $\dot{M}$ are taken equal to a constant fraction $\tilde{f}$ of the rates of the mass outflows…
Stars form by gravoturbulent fragmentation of interstellar gas clouds. The supersonic turbulence ubiquitously observed in Galactic molecular gas generates strong density fluctuations with gravity taking over in the densest and most massive…
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…
We investigate the dynamical evolution of star clusters during their formation, assuming that they are born from a turbulent starless clump of a given mass that is embedded within a parent self-gravitating molecular cloud characterized by a…
I review some recent work on low-mass star formation, with an emphasis on theory, basic principles, and unresolved questions. Star formation is both a gravitational fragmentation problem as well as an accretion problem. Molecular cloud…
Observations of the dust and gas around embedded stellar clusters reveal some of the processes involved in their formation and evolution. Large scale mass infall with rates dM/dt=4e-4 solar masses/year is found to be disrupted on small…
Similar to their low-mass counterparts, massive stars likely form via the collapse of pre-stellar molecular cores. Recent observations suggest that most massive cores are subvirial (i.e., not supported by turbulence) and therefore are…
Star formation is one of the least understood processes in cosmic evolution. It is difficult to formulate a general theory for star formation in part because of the wide range of physical processes involved. The interstellar gas out of…