Related papers: Star-Forming Complexes in Galaxies
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…
Young galaxies are clumpy, gas-rich, and highly turbulent. Star formation appears to occur by gravitational instabilities in galactic disks. The high dispersion makes the clumps massive and the disks thick. The star formation rate should be…
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…
Massive stars blow powerful winds and eventually explode as supernovae. By doing so, they inject energy and momentum in the circumstellar medium, which is pushed away from the star and piles up to form a dense and expanding shell of gas.…
Star clusters have hierarchical patterns in space and time, suggesting formation processes in the densest regions of a turbulent interstellar medium. Clusters also have hierarchical substructure when they are young, which makes them all…
The origin and types of spiral arms are reviewed with an emphasis on the connections between these arms and star formation. Flocculent spiral arms are most likely the result of transient instabilities in the gas that promote dense cloud…
Star formation is intimately linked to the dynamical evolution of molecular clouds. Turbulent fragmentation determines where and when protostellar cores form, and how they contract and grow in mass via accretion from the surrounding cloud…
Stars form predominantly in clusters inside dense clumps of turbulent, magnetized molecular clouds. The typical size and mass of the cluster-forming clumps are \sim 1 pc and \sim 10^2 - 10^3 M_\odot, respectively. Here, we discuss some…
Star formation is triggered in essentially three ways: (1) the pressures from existing stars collect and squeeze nearby dense gas into gravitationally unstable configurations, (2) random compression from supersonic turbulence makes new…
Stars form predominantly in clusters inside dense clumps of molecular clouds that are both turbulent and magnetized. The typical size and mass of the cluster-forming clumps are $\sim 1$ pc and $\sim 10^2 - $ 10$^3$ M$_\odot$, respectively.…
The conversion of gas into stars is a fundamental process in astrophysics and cosmology. Stars are known to form from the gravitational collapse of dense clumps in interstellar molecular clouds, and it has been proposed that the resulting…
We propose and investigate a new formation mechanism for globular clusters in which they form within molecular clouds that are formed in the shocked regions created by galactic winds driven by successive supernova explosions shortly after…
The most recent observational evidence seems to indicate that giant molecular clouds are predominantly gravitationally unbound objects. In this paper we show that this is a natural consequence of a scenario in which cloud-cloud collisions…
The formation of massive stellar clusters is intricately linked to star formation on local and global scales. All actively star forming galaxies are forming clusters, and the local initial conditions likely determine whether bound massive…
Mergers of massive gas-rich galaxies trigger violent starbursts that - over timescales of $> 100$ Myr and regions $> 10$ kpc - form massive and compact star clusters comparable in mass and radii to Galactic globular clusters. The star…
We study the galactic-scale triggering of star formation. We find that the largest mass-scale not stabilized by rotation, a well defined quantity in a rotating system and with clear dynamical meaning, strongly correlates with the star…
Empirical star formation laws from the last 20 years are reviewed with a comparison to simulations. The current form in main galaxy disks has a linear relationship between the star formation rate per unit area and the molecular cloud mass…
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…
Understanding star formation is problematic as it originates in the large scale dynamics of a galaxy but occurs on the small scale of an individual star forming event. This paper presents the first numerical simulations to resolve the star…
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…