Related papers: Star Formation and the Initial Mass Function
Frequent supernova explosions in compact starburst regions are a main shaper of these regions' interstellar media (ISM). In most starbursts, the supernova remnants blast open a hot phase that fills the regions and launches a superwind.…
Supersonic turbulence plays a dual role in molecular clouds: On one hand, it contributes to the global support of the clouds, while on the other it promotes the formation of small-scale density fluctuations, identifiable with clumps and…
In order to investigate the origin of the interstellar turbulence, detailed observations in the CO J=1--0 and 3--2 lines have been carried out in an interacting region of a molecular cloud with an HII region. As a result, several 1,000 to…
Turbulence, self-gravity, and cooling convert most of the interstellar medium into cloudy structures that form stars. Turbulence compresses the gas into clouds directly and it moves pre-existing clouds around passively when there are…
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…
We investigate the core mass distribution (CMD) resulting from numerical models of turbulent fragmentation of molecular clouds. In particular we study its dependence on the sonic root-mean-square Mach number $\Ms$. We analyze simulations…
These lectures attempt to expose the most important ideas, which have been proposed to explain the formation of stars with particular emphasis on the formation of brown dwarfs and low-mass stars. We first describe the important physical…
The observational record of turbulence within the molecular gas phase of the interstellar medium is summarized. We briefly review the analysis methods used to recover the velocity structure function from spectroscopic imaging and the…
We present high-resolution simulations of the first star-forming clouds in 15 minihalos with masses ranging from $\sim 10^5$ to $10^7\ \text{M}_{\odot}$ at redshifts $z \sim 17-20$, using the GIZMO code. Our simulations incorporate detailed…
A fundamental issue in star formation is understanding the precise mechanisms leading to the formation of prestellar cores, and their subsequent gravitationally unstable evolution. To address this question, we carefully construct a suite of…
Turbulence in the interstellar medium (ISM) is crucial in the process of star formation. Shocks produced by supernova explosions, jets, radiation from massive stars, or galactic spiral-arm dynamics are amongst the most common drivers of…
Recently, we have shown that if the ISM is governed by super-sonic turbulent flows, the excursion-set formalism can be used to calculate the statistics of self-gravitating objects over a wide range of scales. On the largest self-gravitating…
The theory for the formation of the first population of stars (Pop III) predicts an initial mass function (IMF) dominated by high-mass stars, in contrast to the present-day IMF, which tends to yield mostly stars with masses less than 1…
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…
One of the outstanding puzzles about star formation is why it proceeds so slowly. Giant molecular clouds convert only a few percent of their gas into stars per free-fall time, and recent observations show that this low star formation rate…
Understanding the processes that determine the stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF) is a critical unsolved problem, with profound implications for many areas of astrophysics. In molecular clouds, stars are formed in cores, gas condensations…
In the solar neighborhood, the Initial Mass Function (IMF) follows is canonically described by the Salpeter power-law slope for the high-mass range. The stellar IMF may directly result from a Core Mass Function (CMF) through accretion,…
Observed variations in the slope of the initial stellar mass function are shown to be consistent with a model in which the protostellar gas is randomly sampled from hierarchical clouds at a rate proportional to the square root of the local…
We present an analytical determination of the star formation rate (SFR) in molecular clouds, based on a time-dependent extension of our analytical theory of the stellar initial mass function (IMF). The theory yields SFR's in good agreement…
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…