Related papers: Protostellar collapse induced by compression. II: …
A viable solution to the origin of close binary systems, unaccounted for in recent theories, is presented. Fragmentation, occurring at the end of the secondary collapse phase (during which molecular hydrogen is dissociating), can form…
Young protostars embedded in circumstellar discs accrete from an angular momentum-rich mass reservoir. Without some braking mechanism, all stars should be spinning at or near break-up velocity. In this paper, we perform simulations of the…
We review theoretical models of the early stages of star formation, in which gravitational collapse is strongly regulated by magnetic fields and the associated process of ambipolar diffusion. We discuss results of numerical simulations and…
Many questions in physical cosmology regarding the thermal history of the intergalactic medium, chemical enrichment, reionization, etc. are thought to be intimately related to the nature and evolution of pregalactic structure. In particular…
We use time-dependent, one-dimensional disc models to investigate the evolution of protostellar discs that form through the collapse of molecular cloud cores and in which the primary transport mechanism is self-gravity. We assume that these…
We investigate the dynamics of gaseous clumps formed via gravitational fragmentation in young protostellar disks, focusing on the fragments that are ejected from the disk via many-body gravitational interaction. Numerical hydrodynamics…
The observed rapid onset of star formation in molecular clouds requires rapid formation of dense fragments which can collapse individually before being overtaken by global gravitationally-driven flows. Many previous investigations have…
We report results from radiation hydrodynamical simulations of the collapse of molecular cloud cores to form protostars. The calculations follow the formation and evolution of the first hydrostatic core/disc, the collapse to form a stellar…
Magnetic fields play an important role in star formation by regulating the removal of angular momentum from collapsing molecular cloud cores. Hall diffusion is known to be important to the magnetic field behaviour at many of the…
Many questions in physical cosmology regarding the thermal history of the intergalactic medium, chemical enrichment, reionization, etc. are thought to be intimately related to the nature and evolution of pregalactic structure. In particular…
A fraction of the dense cores within a turbulent molecular cloud will eventually collapse to form stars. Identifying the physical criteria for instability and analyzing critical core properties is therefore necessary to star 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 use magnetic collapse models to place some constraints on the formation and angular momentum evolution of circumstellar disks which are embedded in magnetized cloud cores. Previous models have shown that the early evolution of a…
The internal rotation and magnetism of evolved massive stars are considered in response to i) the inward pumping of angular momentum through deep and slowly rotating convective layers; and ii) the winding up of a helical magnetic field in…
We present a parameter survey of fragmentation in collapsar disks, using a revised version of the Chen & Beloborodov (2007) model that determines the structure of steady state hyperaccretion disks in a general relativistic and neutrino…
We investigate the role of non-isothermality in gravitational collapse and protostellar accretion by explicitly including the effects of molecular radiative cooling, gas-dust energy transfer, and cosmic ray heating in models of spherical…
We present the latest development of the disk gravitational instability and fragmentation model, originally introduced by us to explain episodic accretion bursts in the early stages of star formation. Using our numerical hydrodynamics model…
Modeling of the self-consistent formation and evolution of disks as a result of prestellar core collapse reveals an intense early phase of recurrent gravitational instability and clump formation. These clumps generally migrate inward due to…
We present the results of eighteen magnetohydrodynamical calculations of the collapse of a molecular cloud core to form a protostar. Some calculations include radiative transfer in the flux-limited diffusion approximation while others…
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…