Related papers: Protostellar half-life: new methodology and estima…
We investigate the formation of protostellar clusters during the collapse of dense molecular cloud cores with a focus on the evolution of potential and kinetic energy, the degree of substructure, and the early phase of mass segregation. Our…
We present the latest development of the disk gravitational instability and fragmentation model, originally introduced by us to explain episodic accretion bursts in the early stages of star formation. Using our numerical hydrodynamics model…
Identifying the processes that determine strength, duration and variability of protostellar mass growth is a fundamental ingredient of any theory of star formation. I discuss protostellar mass accretion rates dM/dt from numerical models…
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…
A high number of embedded clusters is found in the Galaxy. Depending on the formation scenario, most of them can evolve to unbounded groups that are dissolved within a few tens of Myr. A systematic study of young stellar clusters showing…
Protoplanetary disks are thought to be the birth places of planetary systems. The formation and the subsequent evolution of protoplanetary disks are regulated by the star formation process, which begins with the collapse of a cloud core to…
High-mass prestellar cores are extremely rare. The search for such objects has long been hindered by small sample sizes, leading to large uncertainties in their lifetimes and the conditions in which high-mass stars ($> 8\,M_{\odot}$) form.…
The main accretion phase of star formation is investigated in clouds with different metallicities in the range of 0 \le Z \le Z_\odot, resolving the protostellar radius. Starting from a near-equilibrium prestellar cloud, we calculate the…
Stars do not simply pop up on the main sequence. Before the stars arrive on the zero-age main sequence, they form in the collapses of molecular clouds, gain matter through accretion processes, and compress their cores until hydrogen can…
This paper investigates the dynamical evolution of embedded stellar clusters from the protocluster stage, through the embedded star-forming phase, and out to ages of 10 Myr -- after the gas has been removed from the cluster. The relevant…
We use N-body integration to follow the evolution of clusters of 200 binary systems with different initial half mass radii $R_{0.5}$. We also simulate single-star clusters. All clusters evolve according to the same $n(t)$ curve, where…
The distribution of protostar masses is studied for core-environment systems whose duration of infall follows a waiting-time distribution. Each core-environment system has a continuous density profile with no barrier to mass flow. The core…
We study the formation of the protoplanetary disk by the collapse of a primordial molecular cloud, and how its evolution leads to the selection of specific types of planets. We use a hydrodynamical code that accounts for the dynamics,…
We investigate the formation of the first stars at the end of the cosmic dark ages with a suite of three-dimensional, moving mesh simulations that directly resolve the collapse of the gas beyond the formation of the first protostar at the…
Most stars form in highly clustered environments within molecular clouds, but eventually disperse into the distributed stellar field population. Exactly how the stellar distribution evolves from the embedded stage into gas-free associations…
We present an evolutionary picture of a forming star. We assume a singular, isothermal sphere as the initial state of the core that undergoes collapse as described by \citet{shu77}. We include the evolution of a first hydrostatic core at…
During the early phases of low-mass star formation, episodic accretion causes the ejection of high-velocity outflow bullets, which carry a fossil record of the driving protostar's accretion history. We present 44 SPH simulations of…
Ambipolar diffusion likely plays a pivotal role in the formation and evolution of dense cores in weakly-ionized molecular clouds. Linear analyses show that the evolutionary times and fragmentation scales are significantly greater than the…
We review the properties of low mass dense molecular cloud cores, including starless, prestellar, and Class 0 protostellar cores, as derived from observations. In particular we discuss them in the context of the current debate surrounding…
Starless cores represent the initial stage of evolution toward (proto)star formation, and a subset of them, known as prestellar cores, with high density (~ 10^6 cm^-3 or higher) and being centrally concentrated are expected to be embryos of…