Related papers: An empirical model for protostellar collapse
Direct observational measurements of the magnetic field strength in prestellar cores typically find supercritical mass-to-flux ratios, suggesting that the magnetic field is insufficient to prevent gravitational collapse. These measurements…
The formation of circumstellar discs is a critical step in the formation of stars and planets. Magnetic fields can strongly affect the evolution of angular momentum during prestellar core collapse, potentially leading to the failure of…
Dense low mass cores in nearby clouds like Taurus and Auriga are some of the simplest sites currently forming stars like our Sun. Because of their simplicity and proximity, dense cores offer the clearest view of the different phases of star…
We develop analytic approximations to the density evolution of prestellar cores, based on the results of hydrodynamical simulations. We use these approximations as input for a time-dependent gas-grain chemical code to investigate the…
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…
Context. Protoplanetary discs are formed due to the fragmentation and collapse of giant molecular cloud cores. The physical properties and structure of a formed disc are of great importance when studying the onset of planet formation…
Star formation begins with the gravitational collapse of a dense core inside a molecular cloud. As the collapse progresses, the centre of the core begins to heat up as it becomes optically thick. The temperature and density in the centre…
We study the formation of the protoplanetary disk by the collapse of a primordial molecular cloud, and how its evolution leads to the selection of specific types of planets. We use a hydrodynamical code that accounts for the dynamics,…
Self-similar solutions provide good descriptions for the gravitational collapse of spherical clouds or stars when the gas obeys a polytropic equation of state, $p=K\rho^\gamma$ (with $\gamma\le 4/3$). We study the behaviors of nonradial…
The rates at which mass accumulates into protostellar cores can now be predicted in numerical simulations. Our purpose here is to develop methods to compare the statistical properties of the predicted protostars with the observable…
We present the first detailed classification of the structures of Class 0 cores in a high resolution simulation of a giant molecular cloud. The simulated cloud contains 10^4 solar masses and produces over 350 cores which allows for…
We investigate the possibility of very early formation of primordial star clusters from high-\sigma perturbations in cold dark matter dominated structure formation scenarios. For this we have developed a powerful 2-level hierarchical…
The study of protostellar collapse or infall has proven unusually difficult and controversial. Some historical context will be provided, against which recent advances can be measured. We now have a substantial number of objects with…
We simulate the formation and collapse of prestellar cores at few-AU resolution in a set of radiation-magneto-hydrodynamic simulations of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) using the grid-based code RAMSES-RT. We adopt, for the first time to our…
The evolution of collapsing clouds embedded in different star-forming environments is investigated using three-dimensional non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics simulations considering different cloud metallicities ($Z/\thinspace Z_\odot$ = 0,…
We present a study of the density structure of the protostellar collapse candidate B335 using continuum observations from the IRAM Plateau de Bure Interferometer made at wavelengths of 1.2mm and 3.0mm. We analyze these data, which probe…
Young protostellar discs provide the initial conditions for planet formation. The properties of these discs may be different from those of late-phase (T Tauri) discs due to continuing infall from the envelope and protostellar variability…
We have observed the HCO+ J=3-2 line toward 17 starless cores selected from the list of Ward-Thompson et al. (1994). Six of these cores have line asymmetries indicative of collapse. The excess of blue-skewed profiles over red-skewed…
We report results from twelve simulations of the collapse of a molecular cloud core to form one or more protostars, comprising three field strengths (mass-to-flux ratios, {\mu}, of 5, 10, and 20) and four field geometries (with values of…
A numerical hydrodynamical model for the evolution of spherically symmetric collapsing clouds, designed for the calculation of the thermal structure of these objects in both the prestellar and protostellar stages of their evolution, is…