Related papers: Competitive Accretion in Clusters and the IMF
Recent observations and hydrodynamical simulations of star formation inside a giant molecular cloud have revealed that, within a star forming region, stars do not form evenly distributed throughout this region, but rather in small…
Galaxies accrete their mass by means of both smooth accretion from the cosmic web, and the mergers of smaller entities. We wish to quantify the respective role of these two modes of accretion, which could determine the morphological types…
We present high resolution interferometric and single dish observations of molecular gas in the Serpens cluster-forming core. Star formation does not appear to be homogeneous throughout the core, but is localised in spatially- and…
Young galaxies are clumpy, gas-rich, and highly turbulent. Star formation appears to occur by gravitational instabilities in galactic disks. The high dispersion makes the clumps massive and the disks thick. The star formation rate should be…
Star-forming regions presenting a density gradient experience a higher star formation rate than if they were of uniform density. We refer to the ratio between the star formation rate of a spherical centrally-concentrated gas clump and the…
The concept that stars form in the modern era began some 60 years ago with the key observation of expanding OB associations. Now we see that these associations are an intermediate scale in a cascade of hierarchical structures that begins on…
Recently de Marchi, Paresce & Pulone (2007) studied a sample of twenty globular clusters and found that all clusters with high concentrations have steep stellar mass-functions while clusters with low concentration have comparatively shallow…
We use high-resolution ($\simeq$ 35pc) hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation to investigate the relation between gas accretion and star formation in galaxies hosted by dark matter haloes of mass $10^{12}$ $\mathrm{M_\odot}$ at $z =…
Most stars form in highly clustered environments within molecular clouds, but eventually disperse into the distributed stellar field population. Exactly how the stellar distribution evolves from the embedded stage into gas-free associations…
The physical conditions in molecular clouds control the nature and rate of star formation, with consequences for planet formation and galaxy evolution. The focus of this review is on the conditions that characterize regions of star…
Star formation lies at the center of a web of processes that drive cosmic evolution: generation of radiant energy, synthesis of elements, formation of planets, and development of life. Decades of observations have yielded a variety of…
Observations of the interstellar medium are key to deciphering the physical processes regulating star formation in galaxies. However, observational uncertainties and detection limits can bias the interpretation unless carefully modeled.…
The study of the very young open cluster NGC 6231 clearly shows the presence of a mass segregation for the most massive stars. These observations, combined with those concerning other young objects and very recent numerical simulations,…
We investigate the formation of both clustered and distributed populations of young stars in a single molecular cloud. We present a numerical simulation of a 10,000 solar mass elongated, turbulent, molecular cloud and the formation of over…
The collapse of massive molecular clumps can produce high mass stars, but the evolution is not simply a scaled-up version of low mass star formation. Outflows and radiative effects strongly hinder the formation of massive stars via…
Star clusters are born in a highly compact configuration, typically with radii of less than about 1 pc roughly independently of mass. Since the star-formation efficiency is less than 50 per cent by observation and because the residual gas…
Gas accretion is necessary to maintain star formation, spiral and bar structure, and secular evolution in galaxies. This can occur through tidal interaction, or mass accretion from cosmic filaments. Different processes will be reviewed to…
We examine the effect of an accretion disc on the orbits of stars in the central star cluster surrounding a central massive black hole by performing a suite of 39 high-accuracy direct N-body simulations using state-of-the art software and…
When a detailed model of a stellar population is unavailable, it is most common to assume that stellar masses are independently and identically distributed according to some distribution: the universal initial mass function (IMF). However,…
The evolution of galaxies results from a combination of internal and external processes. The star formation is an internal process transforming cold and dense cores of molecular clouds to stars. It may be triggered internally by expanding…