Related papers: The Structure of Cold Molecular Cloud Cores
Starless molecular cores are natural laboratories for interstellar molecular chemistry research. The chemistry of ices in such objects was investigated with a three-phase (gas, surface, and mantle) model. We considered the center part of…
Magnetic fields are believed to play an important role in controlling the stability and contraction of dense condensations of gas and dust leading to the formation of stars and planetary systems. In the present study, the magnetic field of…
[Abridged] $Context.$ Pre-stellar cores are centrally concentrated starless cores on the verge of star formation and they represent the initial conditions for star and planet formation. Pre-stellar cores host an active organic chemistry and…
Recently, a subset of starless cores whose thermal Jeans mass is apparently overwhelmed by the mass of the core has been identified, e.g., the core {\small L183}. In literature, massive cores such as this one are often referred to as…
[abridged] We investigate the velocity structure of protostellar cores that result from non-magnetic numerical models of the gravoturbulent fragmentation of molecular cloud material. A large fraction of the cores analyzed are ``quiescent'',…
We investigate the formation of protostellar clusters during the collapse of dense molecular cloud cores with a focus on the evolution of potential and kinetic energy, the degree of substructure, and the early phase of mass segregation. Our…
We have performed smoothed particle radiation magnetohydrodynamics (SPRMHD) simulations of the collapse of rotating, magnetised molecular cloud cores to form protostars. The calculations follow the formation and evolution of the first…
Our understanding of the physical and chemical structure of pre-stellar cores, the simplest star-forming sites, has significantly improved since the last IAU Symposium on Astrochemistry (South Korea, 1999). Research done over these years…
Cold ($\sim$10 K) and dense ($\sim$10$^{5}$ cm$^{-3}$) cores of gas and dust within molecular clouds, known as starless and dynamically evolved prestellar cores, are the birthplaces of low-mass ($M$ $\leq$ few M$_\odot$) stars. As…
Starless dense cores eventually collapse dynamically, which forms protostars inside them, and the physical properties of the cores determine the nature of the forming protostars. We report ALMA observations of dust continuum emission and…
Molecular clouds are a fundamental ingredient of galaxies: they are the channels that transform the diffuse gas into stars. The detailed process of how they do it is not completely understood. We review the current knowledge of molecular…
The collapse of dense cores with different metallicities is studied by hydrodynamical calculations coupled with detailed chemical and radiative processes. For this purpose, we construct a simple chemical network with non-equilibrium…
Stellar clusters are born in cold and dusty molecular clouds and the youngest clusters are embedded to various degrees in dusty dark molecular material. Such embedded clusters can be considered protocluster systems. The most deeply buried…
In the standard picture of isolated star formation, dense ``starless'' cores are formed out of magnetic molecular clouds due to ambipolar diffusion. Under the simplest spherical geometry, I demonstrate that ``starless'' cores formed this…
Stars like our Sun form in self-gravitating dense and cold structures within interstellar clouds, called pre-stellar cores. Although much is known about the physical structure of dense clouds just before and soon after the switch-on of a…
We found that in regions of high mass star formation the CS emission correlates well with the dust continuum emission and is therefore a good tracer of the total mass while the N$_2$H$^+$ distribution is frequently very different. This is…
We investigate numerically and semi-analytically the collapse of low-mass, rotating prestellar cores. Initially, the cores are in approximate equilibrium with low rotation (the initial ratio of thermal to gravitational energy is $\alpha_0…
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…
Long wavelength sonic oscillations are observed or inferred in many of the small, dark molecular clouds, the starless cores, that are the precursors to protostars. The oscillations provide significant internal energy and the time scale for…
Low-mass stars are generally understood to form by the gravitational collapse of the dense molecular clouds known as starless cores. Continuum observations have not been able to distinguish among the several different hypotheses that…