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We consider the hypothesis that the formation of elliptical galaxies includes a phase in which star formation is mostly restricted to massive stars, with the bias towards high mass stars increasing with elliptical galaxy mass. The mass…
In this work, we investigate the impact of uncertainties due to convective boundary mixing (CBM), commonly called `overshoot', namely the boundary location and the amount of mixing at the convective boundary, on stellar structure and…
The formation mechanism of the most massive stars is far from completely understood. It is still unclear if the formation is core-fed or clump-fed, i.e. if the process is an extension of what happens in low-mass stars, or if the process is…
Rotation plays a key role in the star-formation process, from pre-stellar cores to pre-main-sequence (PMS) objects. Understanding the formation of massive stars requires taking into account the accretion of angular momentum during their PMS…
Most stars and thus most planetary systems do not form in isolation. The larger star-forming environment affects protoplanetary disks in multiple ways: gravitational interactions with other stars truncate disks and alter the architectures…
Although the basic physics of star formation is classical, numerical simulations have yielded essential insights into how stars form. They show that star formation is a highly nonuniform runaway process characterized by the emergence of…
Improving our understanding of the initial conditions and earliest stages of star formation is crucial to gain insight into the origin of stellar masses, multiple systems, and protoplanetary disks. We review the properties of low-mass dense…
Massive star clusters are often used as tracers of galaxy formation and assembly. In order to do so, we must understand their properties at formation, and how those properties change with time, galactic environment, and galaxy assembly…
When dense granular gases are continuously excited under microgravity conditions, spatial inhomogeneities of the particle number density can emerge. A significant share of particles may collect in strongly overpopulated regions, called…
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…
The effects of rapid rotation on stellar evolution can be profound. We are now beginning to gather enough data to allow a realistic comparison between different physical models. Two key tests for any theory of stellar rotation are first…
The initial conditions are critical for understanding high-mass star formation, but are not well observed. Built on our previous characterization of a Galaxy-wide sample of 463 candidate high-mass starless clumps (HMSCs), here we…
Modeling of the self-consistent formation and evolution of disks as a result of prestellar core collapse reveals an intense early phase of recurrent gravitational instability and clump formation. These clumps generally migrate inward due to…
We investigated the evolution of clusters of galaxies using self-consistent N-body simulations. We varied the initial model of galaxies and clusters, and studied the dependence of evolution on initial conditions. We found that the growth…
We explore the use of strong lensing by galaxy clusters to constrain the dark energy equation of state and its possible time variation. The cores of massive clusters often contain several multiply imaged systems of background galaxies at…
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…
While convection has been known to play a key role in stars for many decades, its implementation in one-dimensional stellar evolution codes still represents a major uncertainty today. The purpose of this work is to investigate the impact of…
The isothermal gravitational collapse and fragmentation of a molecular cloud region and the subsequent formation of a protostellar cluster is investigated numerically. The clump mass spectrum which forms during the fragmentation phase can…
A positive power-law trend between the local surface densities of molecular gas, $\Sigma_{gas}$, and young stellar objects, $\Sigma_{\star}$, in molecular clouds of the Solar Neighbourhood has been identified by Gutermuth et al. How it…
We review the progress that has been made in observing and analyzing molecular cloud structure in recent years. Structures are self-similar over a wide range of scales with similar power law indices independent of the star forming nature of…