Related papers: An Observational View of Structure in Protostellar…
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…
The typical product of the star formation process is a binary star. Binaries have provided the first dynamical measures of the masses of pre-main-sequence (PMS) stars, providing support for the calibrations of PMS evolutionary tracks.…
Disks are ubiquitous in stellar astronomy, and play a crucial role in the formation and evolution of stars. In this contribution we present an overview of the most recent results, with emphasis on high spatial and spectral resolution. We…
Circumstellar disks around young stars are the birthsites of planets. It is thus fundamental to study the disks in which they form, their structure and the physical conditions therein. The first astronomical unit is of great interest…
To understand how planetary systems form in the dusty disks around pre-main-sequence stars a detailed knowledge of the structure and evolution of these disks is required. While this is reasonably well understood for the regions of the disk…
Are magnetic fields important in primordial star formation? Assuming that star formation occurs via an accretion disk that is turbulent, initially because of local gravitational instability, we calculate the disk structure for realistic…
We report our current SMA and ALMA studies of disk and planet formation around protostars. We have revealed that $r \gtrsim$100 AU scale disks in Keplerian rotation are ubiquitous around Class I sources. These Class I Keplerian disks are…
Gaps in protoplanetary disks have long been hailed as signposts of planet formation. However, a direct link between exoplanets and disks remains hard to identify. We present a large sample study of ALMA disk surveys of nearby star-forming…
It appears that most stars are born in clusters, and that at birth most stars have circumstellar discs which are comparable in size to the separations between the stars. Interactions between neighbouring stars and discs are therefore likely…
Spiral structures have been detected in evolved protostellar disks, driving the disk accretion towards the central protostars to facilitate star formation. However, it is still unclear if these structures can form earlier in young…
We study the dependence of protoplanetary disk evolution on stellar mass using a large sample of young stellar objects in nearby young star-forming regions. We update the protoplanetary disk fractions presented in our recent work (paper I…
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…
As protostars evolve from optically faint / infrared bright (Class I) sources to optically bright / infrared faint (Class II) the solid material in their surrounding disks accumulates into planetesimals and protoplanets. The nearby, young…
The embedded phase of star formation is the crucial phase where most of the stellar mass is assembled. Velocity-resolved spectra reveal an infalling envelope, bipolar outflows, and perhaps an infant circumstellar disk -- all locked together…
We propose to the community a comprehensive UV/optical/NIR imaging survey of Galactic star formation regions to probe all aspects of the star formation process. The primary goal of such a study is to understand the evolution of…
While it is widely accepted that planets are formed in protoplanetary disks, there is still much debate on when this process happens. In a few cases protoplanets have been directly imaged, but for the vast majority of systems, disk gaps and…
Recent imaging of protoplanetary disks with high resolution and contrast have revealed a striking variety of substructure. Of particular interest are cases where near-infrared scattered light images show evidence for low-intensity annular…
A model for massive stars is constructed by piecing together evolutionary algorithms for the protostellar structure, the environment, the inflow and the radiation feedback. We investigate specified accretion histories of constant,…
The physical and chemical conditions in young protoplanetary disks set the boundary conditions for planet formation. Although the dust in disks is relatively easily detected as a far-IR photometric ``excess'' over the expected photospheric…
The formation and evolution of the circumstellar disk in the collapsing molecular cloud is investigated from the prestellar stage resolving both the molecular cloud core and the protostar itself. In the collapsing cloud, the first adiabatic…