Related papers: The opacity limit
The Rosseland mean opacity of dust in protoplanetary disks is often calculated assuming the interstellar medium (ISM) size distribution and a constant dust-to-gas ratio. However, the dust size distribution and the dust-to-gas ratio in…
The pancake collapse of pregalactic clouds under UV background radiation is explored with a one-dimensional sheet model. Here, attention is concentrated on elucidating the basic physics on the thermal evolution of pregalactic clouds exposed…
Magnetic fields play such roles in star formation as the angular momentum transport in star-forming clouds, thereby controlling circumstellar disc formation and even binary star formation efficiency. The coupling between the magnetic field…
If dark matter decay or annihilate, a large amount of energy and particles would be released into the cosmic plasma. Therefore, they could modify the thermal and ionization history of our universe, then leave footprints on the cosmic…
A sample of local galaxies for which far infrared and uv fluxes are available is used to estimate the characteristic dust extinction in galaxies and to test whether standard dust properties are plausible. Assuming galaxies can be…
Fifty-one dense cores associated with water masers were mapped at 350 micron. These cores are very luminous, 10^3 < Lbol/Lsun < 10^6, indicative of the formation of massive stars. Dust continuum contour maps and photometry are presented for…
The mass of a protostar is calculated from the infall and dispersal of an isothermal sphere in a uniform background. For high contrast between peak and background densities and for short dispersal time t_d, the accretion is "self-limiting":…
Over the last two decades, realistic studies have often concluded that the first bound objects to form can be very small, much smaller than a solar mass. After recombination, the Jeans mass drops rapidly to the order of a Giant Molecular…
The cross section of material in debris discs is thought to be dominated by the smallest grains that can still stay in bound orbits despite the repelling action of stellar radiation pressure. Thus the minimum (and typical) grain size…
We are living in a dusty universe: dust is ubiquitously seen in a wide variety of astrophysical environments, ranging from circumstellar envelopes around cool red giants to supernova ejecta, from diffuse and dense interstellar clouds and…
Context. Molecular Clouds (MCs) are the place where stars are formed and their feedback starts to take place, regulating the evolution of galaxies. Therefore, MCs represent the critical scale at which to study how ultra-violet (UV) photons…
A simple assumption of an emergence in gas of small atomic clusters consisting of $c$ particles each, leads to a phase separation (first order transition). It reveals itself by an emergence of ``forbidden'' density range starting at a…
The cooling of a young bare strange star is studied numerically by solving the equations of energy conservation and heat transport for both normal and superconducting strange quark matter inside the star. We show that the thermal luminosity…
In the context of the star formation through the fragmentation of an extremely metal-deficient protogalactic cloud, the gravitational collapse of filamentary gas clouds is explored with H$_2$ and HD chemistry. It is found by 1D…
A novel way of looking at the evolution of star clusters is presented. With a dynamical temperature, given by the mean kinetic energy of the cluster stars, and a dynamical luminosity, which is defined as the kinetic energy of the stars…
(Abridged) We aim to determine the degrees of CO depletion, deuterium fractionation, and ionisation in a sample of seven massive clumps associated with IRDCs. The APEX telescope was used to observe the C17O(2-1), H13CO+(3-2), DCO+(3-2),…
One of the best motivated hypotheses in cosmology states that most of the matter in the universe is in the form of weakly-interacting massive particles that decoupled early in the history of the universe and cooled adiabatically to an…
Models of core accretion assume that in the radiative zones of accreting gas envelopes, radiation diffuses. But super-Earths/sub-Neptunes (1-4$R_\oplus$, 2-20$M_\oplus$) point to formation conditions that are optically thin: their modest…
The fragmentation of star-forming interstellar clouds, and the resulting stellar initial mass function (IMF), is strongly affected by the temperature structure of the collapsing gas. Since radiation feedback from embedded stars can modify…
The Humphreys-Davidson (HD) limit empirically defines a region of high luminosities (log L > 5.5) and low effective temperatures (T < 20kK) on the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram in which hardly any supergiant stars are observed. Attempts to…