Related papers: Competitive Accretion and the IMF
The evolution of galaxies results from a combination of internal and external processes. The star formation is an internal process transforming cold and dense cores of molecular clouds to stars. It may be triggered internally by expanding…
The observed distribution of IMF shapes can be understood as statistical sampling from a universal IMF and variations that result from stellar-dynamical processes. However, young star clusters appear to have an IMF biased towards low-mass…
Galaxies are expected to accrete pristine gas from their surroundings to sustain their star formation over cosmic timescales. Its lower abundance affects the metallicity of the ISM in which stars are born, leaving chemical imprints in the…
Most stars form in dense stellar environments. It is speculated that some dense star clusters may host intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), which may have formed from runaway collisions between high-mass stars, or from the mergers of less…
We study the response of the structure of an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star to the accretion of a brown dwarf or planet in its interior. In particular, we examine the case in which the brown dwarf spirals-in, and the accreted matter is…
We review recent high spatial resolution millimeter continuum and spectral line observations of (proto-)cluster regions. These observations reveal that the mass distribution of prestellar cores is consistent with the initial mass function…
Observations and theories of the stellar initial mass function are reviewed. The universality and large total mass range of the power law portion of the IMF suggest a connection between stellar mass and cloud structure. The fractal patterns…
We studied the final phases of galactic mergers, focusing on interactions between supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and the interstellar medium in a central sub-kpc region, using an N-body/hydrodynamics code. This numerical experiment aims…
Strongly magnetized accreting stars are often hypothesized to be in `spin equilibrium' with their surrounding accretion flows, which requires that the accretion rate changes more slowly than it takes the star to reach spin equilibrium. This…
The mass reinserted by young stars of an emerging massive compact cluster shows a bimodal hydrodynamic behaviour. In the inner part of the cluster, it is thermally unstable, while in its outer parts it forms an out-blowing wind. The…
Central cluster galaxies in cooling flows show the signatures of gaseous accretion and ongoing star formation at rates ranging between 1-100 solar masses per year. Their blue morphologies usually reflect the low net angular momentum content…
We study the evolution of disk accretion during the merger of supermassive black hole binaries in galactic nuclei. In hierarchical galaxy formation models, the most common binaries are likely to arise from minor galactic mergers, and have…
We demonstrate that the mass of the most massive star in a cluster correlates non-trivially with the cluster mass. A simple algorithm according to which a cluster is filled up with stars that are chosen randomly from the standard IMF but…
The combination of a finite time-scale for star formation, rapid early stellar evolution and rapid stellar-dynamical processes imply that the stellar IMF cannot be inferred for any star cluster independently of its age (the Cluster IMF…
Young stars are expected to gain most of their mass by accretion from a disk that forms around them as a result of angular momentum conservation in the collapsing protostellar cloud. Accretion initially proceeds at high rates of…
We suggest that the intrinsic, stellar initial mass function (IMF) follows a power-law slope gamma=2, inherited from hierarchical fragmentation of molecular clouds into clumps and clumps into stars. The well-known, logarithmic Salpeter…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) of early-type galaxies is the combination of the IMF of the stellar population formed in-situ and that of accreted stellar populations. Using as an observable the effective IMF $\alpha_{IMF}$, defined…
In young star clusters, the density can be high enough and the velocity dispersion low enough for stars to collide and merge with a significant probability. This has been suggested as a possible way to build up the high-mass portion of the…
We study the dynamical evolution of the young star cluster Arches and its dependence on the assumed initial stellar mass function (IMF). We perform many direct $N$-body simulations with various initial conditions and two different choices…
The self-enrichment scenario for globular clusters (GC) requires large amounts of residual gas after the initial formation of the first stellar generation. Recently, Krause et al. (2012) found that supernovae may not be able to expel that…