Related papers: Competitive Accretion in Clusters and the IMF
Stars do not generally form in isolation. Instead, they form in clusters, and in these clustered environments newborn stars can have profound effects on one another and on their parent gas clouds. Feedback from clustered stars is almost…
Massive stars influence their surroundings through radiation, winds, and supernova explosions far out of proportion to their small numbers. However, the physical processes that initiate and govern the birth of massive stars remain poorly…
A dense-enough gas-accumulation evolves, over a few Myr of intensifying star formation, to an embedded cluster. If it contains a sufficient amount of mass, O stars form and explosively expel the remaining gas, whereas poorer clusters reduce…
This paper discusses how cosmic gas accretion controls star formation, and summarizes the physical properties expected for the cosmic gas accreted by galaxies. The paper also collects observational evidence for gas accretion sustaining star…
Accretion studies have been focused on the flow around bodies with point mass gravitational potentials, but few general results are available for non-point mass distributions. Here, we study the accretion flow onto non-divergent, core…
In young star clusters, the density can be high enough and the velocity dispersion low enough for stars to collide and merge with a significant probability. This has been suggested as a possible way to build up the high-mass portion of the…
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…
In the earliest phases of their evolution, stars gain mass through the acquisition of matter from their birth clouds. The widely accepted classical concept of early stellar evolution neglects the details of this accretion phase and assumes…
The observed slope at the high-mass end of the initial mass function (IMF) displays a remarkable universality in a wide variety of physical environments. We predict that competitive accretion, the ongoing accretion of gas from a common…
We analyse N-body and Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamic (SPH) simulations of young star-forming regions to search for differences in the spatial distributions of massive stars compared to lower-mass stars. The competitive accretion theory of…
We investigate the contraction of accreting protoclusters using an extension of n-body techniques that incorporates the accretional growth of stars from the gaseous reservoir in which they are embedded. Following on from Monte Carlo studies…
The origin of the population of very massive stars observed within $\sim 0.4$ pc of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre is a mystery. Tidal forces from the black hole would likely inhibit {\it in situ} star formation whilst…
The standard picture of accretion is a steady flow of matter from the disc onto the young star - a concept which assumes the star-disc system to be completely isolated. However, in a dense cluster environment star-disc systems do interact…
We investigate the triggering of star formation and the formation of stellar clusters in molecular clouds that form as the ISM passes through spiral shocks. The spiral shock compresses gas into $\sim$100 pc long main star formation ridge,…
Stellar clusters are critical constituents within galaxies: they are the result of highest-density star formation, and through their spatially and temporally correlated feedback they regulate their host galaxy evolution. We present a novel…
We examine the origin of clustercentric gradients in the star formation rates and colors of rich cluster galaxies within the context of a simple model where clusters are built through the ongoing accretion of field galaxies. The model…
The formation of massive stars in close binary systems is complicated due to their high radiation pressure, the crowded environment and the expected minimum separation for fragmentation being many times greater than the orbital separation.…
We explore the gravitational influence of pressure supported stellar systems on the internal density distribution of a gaseous environment. We conclude that compact massive star clusters with masses >= 10^6 M_sun act as cloud condensation…
Star formation within the central galaxies of galaxy clusters is often interpreted as being fueled by cooling of the hot intracluster medium. However, the star-forming gas is dusty, and Spitzer spectra show that the dust properties are…
Recent surveys of star forming regions have shown that most stars, and probably all massive stars, are born in dense stellar clusters. The mechanism by which a molecular cloud fragments to form several hundred to thousands of individual…