Related papers: Star Formation in Space and Time: Taurus-Auriga
The remarkably filamentary spatial distribution of young stars in the Taurus molecular cloud has significant implications for understanding low-mass star formation in relatively quiescent conditions. The large scale and regular spacing of…
The Taurus molecular cloud complex is the paradigm for quiescent, low-density, isolated star formation. Yet the age distribution of its stellar population indicates that star formation is a rapid and dynamic process, inconsistent with the…
The Taurus-Auriga complex is the prototypical low-mass star forming region, and provides a unique testbed of the star formation process, which left observable imprints on the spatial, kinematic, and temporal structure of its stellar…
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…
Stars in star clusters are thought to form in a single burst from a common progenitor cloud of molecular gas. However, massive, old globular clusters -- with ages greater than 10 billion years and masses of several hundred thousand solar…
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…
Stars form by gravoturbulent fragmentation of interstellar gas clouds. The supersonic turbulence ubiquitously observed in Galactic molecular gas generates strong density fluctuations with gravity taking over in the densest and most massive…
Star clusters form in dense, hierarchically collapsing gas clouds. Bulk kinetic energy is transformed to turbulence with stars forming from cores fed by filaments. In the most compact regions, stellar feedback is least effective in removing…
Star clusters stand at the intersection of much of modern astrophysics: the interstellar medium, gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, and cosmology. Here we review observations and theoretical models for the formation, evolution, and…
We study the temporal and spatial distribution of star formation rates in four well-studied star-forming regions in local molecular clouds(MCs): Taurus, Perseus, $\rho$ Ophiuchi, and Orion A. Using published mass and age estimates for young…
Observations suggest that star formation occurs in only one or two crossing times for a range of scales spanning a factor of 1000. These observations include (1) measurements of embedded cluster ages in comparison with the cloud core…
We investigate the formation and early evolution of star clusters assuming that they form from a turbulent starless clump of given mass bounded inside a parent self-gravitating molecular cloud characterized by a particular mass surface…
Stars and star clusters form by gravoturbulent fragmentation of interstellar gas clouds. The supersonic turbulence ubiquitously observed in Galactic molecular gas generates strong density fluctuations with gravity taking over in the densest…
Palla & Stahler have recently argued that star formation in Taurus and other nearby molecular clouds extends over a period of at least 10 Myr, implying quasi-static cloud evolution and star formation. Their conclusions contradict other…
Young stars form on a wide range of scales, producing aggregates and clusters with various degrees of gravitational self-binding. The loose aggregates have a hierarchical structure in both space and time that resembles interstellar…
We review the history and structure of star formation in the Taurus-Auriga dark clouds. Our discussion includes a summary of the macroscopic cloud properties, the population of single and binary pre-main sequence stars, the properties of…
Massive stars form in clusters within self-gravitating molecular clouds. The size scale of these clusters is sufficiently large that non-thermal, or turbulent, motions of the gas must be taken into account when considering their formation.…
Most young stars in nearby molecular clouds have estimated ages of 1-2 Myr, suggesting that star formation is rapid. However, small numbers of stars in these regions with inferred ages of >= 5-10 Myr have been cited to argue that star…
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…
We study the formation and early evolution of star clusters that have a wide range of masses and background cloud mass surface densities, $\Sigma_{\rm cloud}$, which help set the initial sizes, densities, and velocity dispersions of the…