Related papers: The Stellar IMF from Turbulent Fragmentation
The diffuse interstellar medium is dynamic, and its chemistry and evolution is determined by shock fronts as well as photodissociation. Shocks are implied by the supersonic motions and velocity dispersion often statistically called…
Supersonic turbulence in molecular clouds is a dominant agent that strongly affects the clouds' evolution and star formation activity. Turbulence may be initiated and maintained by a number of processes, acting at a wide range of physical…
The stellar initial mass function is of great significance for the study of star formation and galactic structure. Observations indicate that the IMF follows a power-law form. This work derived that when the expected number of stars formed…
"The purpose of numerical models is not numbers but insight." (Hamming) In the spirit of this adage, and of Don Cox's approach to scientific speaking, we discuss the questions that the latest generation of numerical models of the…
Massive stars, multiple stellar systems and clusters are born from the gravitational collapse of massive dense gaseous clumps, and the way these systems form strongly depends on how the parent clump fragments into cores during collapse.…
The mass distribution of prestellar cores is obtained for clouds with arbitrary internal mass distributions using a selection criterion based on the thermal and turbulent Jeans mass and applied hierarchically from small to large scales. We…
The results of study of the gravitational fragmentation in the interstellar medium (ISM) by clump-clump collisions are presented. We suggest, that collision of clumps, that are subparts of Giant Molecular Clouds (GMC) may be on of the basic…
It is suggested that the thermal physics of star-forming clouds may play a more important role than has usually been recognized in the origin of the stellar IMF and in determining a characteristic mass scale. The importance of the thermal…
Mass functions of starless dense cores (CMFs) may arise from contraction and dispersal of core-forming filaments. In an illustrative model, a filament contracts radially by self-gravity, increasing the mass of its cores. During this…
Understanding the star formation process is central to much of modern astrophysics. For several decades it has been thought that stellar birth is primarily controlled by the interplay between gravity and magnetostatic support, modulated by…
Passive scalar mixing (metals, molecules, etc.) in the turbulent interstellar medium (ISM) is critical for abundance patterns of stars and clusters, galaxy and star formation, and cooling from the circumgalactic medium. However, the…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) integrated over an entire galaxy is an integral over all separate star-formation events. Since most stars form in star clusters with different masses the integrated IMF becomes an integral of the…
The origin of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is one of the most debated issues in astrophysics. Here, we explore the possible link between the quasi-universal filamentary structure of star-forming molecular clouds and the origin of…
The mass function of clumps observed in molecular clouds raises interesting theoretical issues, especially in its relation to the stellar initial mass function. We propose a statistical model of the mass function of prestellar cores (CMF),…
We present collapse simulations of strongly magnetised, turbulent molecular cloud cores with masses ranging from 2.6 to 1000 M_sun in order to study the influence of the initial conditions on the turbulence-induced disc formation mechanism…
Recent studies have examined the role of tides in the star formation process. They suggest, notably, that the tides determine the characteristic mass of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) by preventing the collapse of density…
Momentum deposition by radiation pressure from young, massive stars may help to destroy molecular clouds and unbind stellar clusters by driving large-scale outflows. We extend our previous numerical radiation hydrodynamic study of…
The measured star-formation rates (SFRs) of galaxies comprise an important constraint on galaxy evolution and also on their cosmological boundary conditions. Any available tracer of the SFR depends on the shape of the mass-distribution of…
We conduct numerical experiments in which we systematically vary the initial density over four orders of magnitude and the turbulent velocity over a factor ten. In a companion paper, we investigate the dependence of this distribution on the…
The interstellar medium (ISM) provides a unique laboratory for highly supersonic, driven hydrodynamics turbulence. We present a theory of such turbulence, confirm it by numerical simulations, and use the results to explain observational…