Related papers: Star & planet formation: Upcoming opportunities in…
Submillimeter observations with ALMA will be the essential next step in our understanding of how stars and planets form. Key projects range from detailed imaging of the collapse of pre-stellar cores and measuring the accretion rate of…
New images of young stars are revolutionizing our understanding of planet formation. ALMA detects large grains in planet-forming disks with few AU scale resolution and scattered light imaging with extreme adaptive optics systems reveal…
Galaxies grow their supermassive black holes in concert with their stars, although the relationship between these major galactic components is poorly understood. Observations of the cosmic growth of stars and black holes in galaxies suffer…
Circumstellar disks are the sites of planet formation, and the very high incidence of extrasolar planets implies that most of them actually form planetary systems. Studying the structure and evolution of protoplanetary disks can thus place…
How do planets form from circumstellar disks of gas and dust? What physical processes are responsible for determining the final masses of forming stars and ultimately the initial mass function (IMF)? The Hubble Space Telescope has made…
The formation of planets is one of the major unsolved problems in modern astrophysics. Planets are believed to form out of the material in circumstellar disks known to exist around young stars, and which are a by-product of the star…
It is well established in the local Universe that regions of high star-formation rate are dusty. As a result of this physical causal link, galaxies of increasing current star formation activity emit a larger proportion of their bolometric…
Although the star formation process has been studied for decades, many important aspects of the physics involved remain unsolved. Recent advancement of instrumentation in the infrared, far-infrared and sub-millimetre wavelength regimes have…
In these lectures I review observations of star-forming molecular clouds in our Galaxy and nearby galaxies to develop a physical intuition for understanding star formation in the local and high-redshift Universe. A lot of this material is…
The formation of stars, particularly the high-mass star formation, poses several still open questions. Nowadays, thanks to the most modern telescopes and instruments, we are able to observe and analyse many physical and chemical processes…
Star formation involves the flow of gas and dust within molecular clouds into protostars and young stellar objects (YSOs) due to gravity. Along the way, these flows are shaped significantly by many other mechanisms, including pressure,…
We present a review of the interplay between the evolution of circumstellar disks and the formation of planets, both from the perspective of theoretical models and dedicated observations. Based on this, we identify and discuss fundamental…
The spatial distribution and lifetime of molecular gas in the inner regions of young circumstellar disks are key to understanding the formation of planetary systems. Gas-rich disks are observed to disperse in the first ~10 Myr, and recent…
In this chapter of the Protostars and Planets VII, we review the breakthrough progress that has been made in the field of high-resolution, high-contrast optical and near-infrared imaging of planet-forming disks. These advancements include…
At a time when ALMA produces spectacular high resolution images of gas and dust in circumstellar disks, the next observational frontier in our understanding of planet formation and the chemistry of planet-forming material may be found in…
Stars and planets are the fundamental objects of the Universe. Their formation processes, though related, may differ in important ways. Stars almost certainly form from gravitational collapse and probably have formed this way since the…
Stellar halos around galaxies retain fundamental evidence of the processes which lead to their build up. Sophisticated models of galaxy formation in a cosmological context yield quantitative predictions about various observable…
The imaging of disks around young stars presents extreme challenges in high dynamic range, angular resolution, and sensitivity. Recent instrumental advances have met these challenges admirably, leading to a marked increase in imaging…
Stars form from the gravitational collapse of dense molecular cloud cores. In the protostellar phase, mass accretes from the core onto a protostar, likely through an accretion disk, and it is during this phase that the initial masses of…
Planet formation remains a fundamentally important yet poorly understood process. Protoplanetary disks, the birthplaces of planetary systems, exhibit a wide range of substructures that are increasingly interpreted as signatures of…