Related papers: Star Formation
Observations have revealed that most stars are born in clusters. These systems, containing from tens to thousands of stars and typically significant mass in gas in the youngest systems, evolve due to a combination of stellar and star-gas…
Our knowledge of the initial conditions and early stages of high mass star formation is very limited. We will review recent surveys of regions in the early stages of massive star formation using molecular tracers of high density and dust…
The formation of stars from gas drives the evolution of galaxies. Yet, it remains one of the hardest processes to understand when trying to connect observations of stellar and galaxy populations to models of large scale structure formation.…
Stars mostly form in groups consisting of a few dozen to several ten thousand members. For 30 years, theoretical models provide a basic concept of how such star clusters form and develop: they originate from the gas and dust of collapsing…
Cloud environment is thought to play a critical role in determining the mechanism of formation of massive stars. In this contribution we review the physical characteristics of the environment around recently formed massive stars. Particular…
The elegance of inflationary cosmology and cosmological perturbation theory ends with the formation of the first stars and galaxies, the initial sources of light that launched the phenomenologically rich process of cosmic reionization. Here…
We review recent work that investigates the formation of stellar clusters, ranging in scale from globular clusters through open clusters to the small scale aggregates of stars observed in T associations. In all cases, recent advances in…
The star formation history of galaxies is a complex process usually considered to be stochastic in nature, for which we can only give average descriptions such as the color-density relation. In this work we follow star-forming gas particles…
In this chapter we review recent advances in understanding the roles that magnetic fields play throughout the star formation process, gained through observations and simulations of molecular clouds, the dense, star-forming phase of the…
The determination of the star-formation history of the Universe is a key goal of modern cosmology, as it is crucial to our understanding of how structure in the Universe forms and evolves. A picture has built up over recent years,…
Newborn stars form within the localized, high density regions of molecular clouds. The sequence and rate at which stars form in dense clumps and the dependence on local and global environments are key factors in developing descriptions of…
Giant molecular clouds (GMCs) are the primary reservoirs of cold, star-forming molecular gas in the Milky Way and similar galaxies, and thus any understanding of star formation must encompass a model for GMC formation, evolution, and…
Star formation rate and accummulated stellar mass are two fundamental physical quantities that describe the evolutionary state of a forming galaxy. Two recent attempts to determine the relationship between these quantities, by interpreting…
Star formation is inefficient. Recent advances in numerical simulations and theoretical models of molecular clouds show that the combined effects of interstellar turbulence, magnetic fields and stellar feedback can explain the low…
The formation of the first galaxies at redshifts z~10-15 signaled the transition from the simple initial state of the universe to one of ever increasing complexity. We here review recent progress in understanding their assembly process with…
The accretion phase of star formation is investigated in magnetically-dominated clouds that have an initial subcritical mass-to-flux ratio. We employ nonideal magnetohydrodynamic simulations that include ambipolar diffusion and ohmic…
The first stars in the Universe form when chemically pristine gas heats as it falls into dark matter potential wells, cools radiatively due to the formation of molecular hydrogen, and becomes self-gravitating. We demonstrate with…
Empirical star formation laws from the last 20 years are reviewed with a comparison to simulations. The current form in main galaxy disks has a linear relationship between the star formation rate per unit area and the molecular cloud mass…
Massive stars (with mass m_* > 8 solar masses) are fundamental to the evolution of galaxies, because they produce heavy elements, inject energy into the interstellar medium, and possibly regulate the star formation rate. The individual star…
Understanding the formation of the first stars is one of the frontier topics in modern astrophysics and cosmology. Their emergence signaled the end of the cosmic dark ages, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, leading to a…