Related papers: An empirical model for protostellar collapse
The last decade has witnessed significant advances in our observational understanding of the earliest stages of low-mass star formation. The advent of sensitive receivers on large radio telescopes such as the JCMT and IRAM 30m MRT has led…
Improving our understanding of the initial conditions and earliest stages of protostellar collapse is crucial to gain insight into the origin of stellar masses, multiple systems, and protoplanetary disks. Observationally, there are two…
The current study was developed to provide a database of relatively simple numerical simulations of protostellar collapse, as a template library for observations of cores and very young protostars, and for researchers who wish to test their…
The complexity of physico-chemical models of star formation is increasing, with models that take into account new processes and more realistic setups. These models allow astrochemists to compute the evolution of chemical species throughout…
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…
A brief summary is presented of our current knowledge of the structure of cold molecular cloud cores that do not contain protostars, sometimes known as starless cores. The most centrally condensed starless cores are known as pre-stellar…
Understanding the collapse of dense molecular cloud cores to stellar densities and the subsequent evolution of the protostar is of importance to model the feedback effects such an object has on its surrounding environment, as well as…
We investigate a method to construct parametrized progenitor models for core-collapse supernova simulations. Different from all modern core-collapse supernova studies, which rely on progenitor models from stellar evolution calculations, we…
Recent high-resolution studies of the L1544 protostellar core by Tafalla et al. and Williams et al. reveal the structure and kinematics of the gas. The observations of this prestellar core provide a natural test for theoretical models of…
Models of self-gravitating gas in the early stages of pressure-free collapse are compared for initial states which are equilibrium layers, cylinders, and Bonnor-Ebert spheres. For each geometrical case the density profile has an inner…
We compute numerical simulations of spherical collapse triggered by a slow increase in external pressure. We compare isothermal models to models including cooling with a simple but self-consistent treatment of the coupling between gas,…
We investigate the impact of different initial conditions for the initial density profile and the initial turbulence on the formation process of protostellar clusters. We study the collapse of dense molecula r cloud cores with…
We perform radiation hydrodynamical simulations of protostellar collapse in spherical symmetry, with a special focus on very low-mass objects, i.e. brown dwarfs and sub-brown dwarfs. The inclusion of a realistic equation of state that…
Improving our understanding of the earliest stages of star formation is crucial to gain insight into the origin of stellar masses, multiple systems, and protoplanetary disks. We discuss recent advances made in this area thanks to detailed…
We present a near-infrared extinction study of nine dense cores at evolutionary stages between starless to Class I. Our results show that the density structure of all but one observed cores can be modeled with a single power law rho \propto…
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…
We review the properties of low mass dense molecular cloud cores, including starless, prestellar, and Class 0 protostellar cores, as derived from observations. In particular we discuss them in the context of the current debate surrounding…
The fragmentation process of primordial-gas cores during prestellar collapse is studied using three-dimensional nested-grid hydrodynamics. Starting from the initial central number density of n \sim10^3 cm^-3, we follow the evolution of…
Among many physical processes involved in star formation, radiation transfer is one of the key processes since it dominantly controls the thermodynamics. Because metallicities control opacities, they are one of the important environmental…
We formulate the problem of the formation and collapse of nonaxisymmetric protostellar cores in weakly ionized, self-gravitating, magnetic molecular clouds. In our formulation, molecular clouds are approximated as isothermal, thin (but with…