Related papers: Magnetically Regulated Star Formation in Turbulent…
The role of MHD turbulence in astrophysical environments is still highly debated. An important question that permeates this debate is the transport of magnetic flux. This is particularly important, for instance, in the context of star…
During the last two decades, the focus of star formation research has shifted from understanding the collapse of a single dense core into a star to studying the formation hundreds to thousands of stars in molecular clouds. In this chapter,…
Stars form in dense cores of molecular clouds that are observed to be significantly magnetized. A dynamically important magnetic field presents a significant obstacle to the formation of protostellar disks. Recent studies have shown that…
Under ideal MHD conditions the magnetic field strength should be correlated with density in the interstellar medium (ISM). However, observations indicate that this correlation is weak. Ambipolar diffusion can decrease the flux-to-mass ratio…
The transport of angular momentum is capital during the formation of low-mass stars; too little removal and rotation ensures stellar densities are never reached, too much and the absence of rotation means no protoplanetary disks can form.…
Stars form within molecular clouds but our understanding of this fundamental process remains hampered by the complexity of the physics that drives their evolution. We review our observational and theoretical knowledge of molecular clouds…
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…
For a molecular cloud clump to form stars some transport of magnetic flux is required from the denser, inner regions to the outer regions of the cloud, otherwise this can prevent the collapse. Fast magnetic reconnection which takes place in…
To understand the formation of a magnetically dominated molecular cloud out of an atomic cloud, we follow the dynamical evolution of the cloud with a time-dependent axisymmetric magnetohydrodynamic code. A thermally stable warm atomic cloud…
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…
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…
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.…
We employ the first fully three-dimensional simulation to study the role of magnetic fields and ion-neutral friction in regulating gravitationally-driven fragmentation of molecular clouds. The cores in an initially subcritical cloud develop…
We use a suite of 3D simulations of star-forming molecular clouds, with and without stellar feedback, magnetic fields, and driven turbulence, to study the compression and expansion rates of the gas as functions of density. We show that,…
(Abridged) The formation of molecular clouds (MCs) from the diffuse interstellar gas appears to be a necessary step for star formation, as young stars invariably occur within them. However, the mechanisms controlling the formation of MCs…
We present numerical studies of compressible, decaying turbulence, with and without magnetic fields, with initial rms Alfven and Mach numbers ranging up to five, and apply the results to the question of the support of star-forming…
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…
We discuss the effects of the magnetic field observed in molecular clouds on the process of star formation, concentrating on the phase of gravitational collapse of low-mass dense cores, cradles of sunlike stars. We summarize recent analytic…
Isolated low-mass stars are formed in dense cores of molecular clouds. In the standard picture, the cores are envisioned to condense out of strongly magnetized clouds through ambipolar diffusion. Most previous calculations based on this…
Magnetic flux redistribution lies at the heart of the problem of star formation in dense cores of molecular clouds that are magnetized to a realistic level. If all of the magnetic flux of a typical core were to be dragged into the central…