Related papers: Competitive Accretion and the IMF
High-resolution simulations of supermassive black holes in isolated galaxies have suggested the importance of short (~10 Myr) episodes of rapid accretion caused by interactions between the black hole and massive dense clouds within the…
A common consequence of accretion onto black holes is the formation of powerful, relativistic jets that escape the system. In the case of supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies this has been known for decades, but for…
Disk accretion may be the fundamental astrophysical process. Stars and planets form through the accretion of gas in a disk. Black holes and galaxies co-evolve through efficient disk accretion onto the central supermassive black hole.…
We examine the effect of an accretion disc on the orbits of stars in the central star cluster surrounding a central massive black hole by performing a suite of 39 high-accuracy direct N-body simulations using state-of-the art software and…
(Abriged) At present, there are two scenarios for the formation of massive stars: 1) The accretion scenario and 2) The coalescence scenario, which implies the merging of intermediate mass stars. We examine here some properties of the first…
If all stars form in clusters and both the stars and the clusters follow a power law distribution which favours the creation of low mass objects, then the numerous low mass clusters will be deficient in high mass stars. Therefore, the mass…
We review the present knowledge of disk accretion in young low mass stars, and in particular, the mass accretion rate and its evolution with time. The methods used to obtain mass accretion rates from ultraviolet excesses and emission lines…
Using 3D AMR simulations, linking the 50 kpc to the sub-pc scales over the course of 40 Myr, we systematically relax the classic Bondi assumptions in a typical galaxy hosting a SMBH. In the realistic scenario, where the hot gas is cooling,…
The main accretion phase of star formation is investigated in clouds with different metallicities in the range of 0 \le Z \le Z_\odot, resolving the protostellar radius. Starting from a near-equilibrium prestellar cloud, we calculate the…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) integrated over an entire galaxy is an integral over all separate star-formation events. Since most stars form in star clusters with different masses the integrated IMF becomes an integral of the…
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…
Here we model a star forming factory in which the continuous creation of stars results in a highly concentrated, massive (globular cluster-like) stellar system. We show that under very general conditions a large-scale gravitational…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) is commonly interpreted to be a scale-invariant probability density distribution function (PDF) such that many small clusters yield the same IMF as one massive cluster of the same combined number of…
We present results from high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations which explore the effects of small scale clustering in star-forming regions. A large ensemble of small-N clusters with 5 stellar seeds have been modelled and the resulting…
The origin of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is a fundamental issue in the theory of star formation. It is generally fit with a composite power law. Some clues on the progenitors can be found in dense starless cores that have a…
We study numerically the evolution of rotating cloud cores, from the collapse of a magnetically supercritical core to the formation of a protostar and the development of a protostellar disk during the main accretion phase. We find that the…
The stellar IMF has been found to be an invariant Salpeter power-law (alpha=2.35) above about 1 Msun, but at the same time a massive star typically has more than one companion. This constrains the possible formation scenarios of massive…
The stellar initial mass function is of great significance for the study of star formation and galactic structure. Observations indicate that the IMF follows a power-law form. This work derived that when the expected number of stars formed…
We propose to interpret the stellar IMF as a property of the turbulence in the star--forming gas. Gravitationally unstable density enhancements in the turbulent flow collapse and form stars. Their mass distribution can be derived…
We study the growth rate of stars via stellar collisions in dense star clusters, calibrating our analytic calculations with direct N-body simulations of up to 65536 stars, performed on the GRAPE family of special-purpose computers. We find…