Related papers: Starless Cores
Stars like our Sun form in self-gravitating dense and cold structures within interstellar clouds, called pre-stellar cores. Although much is known about the physical structure of dense clouds just before and soon after the switch-on of a…
Dust grains coagulate into larger aggregates in dense gas. This changes their size distribution and possibly affects the thermal evolution of star-forming clouds. We here investigate dust coagulation in collapsing pre-stellar cores with…
Understanding the physical properties of star-forming cores as mass reservoirs for protostars, and the impact of turbulence, is crucial in star formation studies. We implemented passive tracer particles in clump-scale numerical simulations…
We have performed survey-type observations in 1 mm continuum and molecular lines toward dense cores (32 prestellar + 7 protostellar) with an average density of $\gtrsim$10$^5$ cm$^{-3}$ in the Taurus molecular clouds using the Atacama Large…
[Abridged] $Context.$ Pre-stellar cores are centrally concentrated starless cores on the verge of star formation and they represent the initial conditions for star and planet formation. Pre-stellar cores host an active organic chemistry and…
We present a NICMOS 1.6 micron imaging isophotal study of 27 early-type galaxies. Our selected sample is not as biased against dusty galaxies as the visible WFPC samples observed with HST. Core galaxies have reduced ellipticity and boxiness…
The infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) G11.11$-$0.12 and G28.34$+$0.06 are two of the best-studied IRDCs in our Galaxy. These two clouds host clumps at different stages of evolution, including a massive dense clump in both clouds that is dark…
Constraining the temperature and density structure of dense molecular cloud cores is fundamental for understanding the initial conditions of star formation. We use Herschel observations of the thermal FIR dust emission from nearby isolated…
Identified as extinction features against the bright Galactic mid-infrared background, infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) are thought to harbor the very earliest stages of star and cluster formation. In order to better characterize the properties…
The connection between dense gas cores and their infant protostars is key to understanding how stars form in molecular clouds. In this paper we investigate the properties, persistence, and protostellar content of cores that would be…
The dense molecular cloud cores that form stars, like other self-gravitating objects, undergo bulk oscillations. Just at the point of gravitational instability, their fundamental oscillation mode has zero frequency. We study, using…
Long wavelength sonic oscillations are observed or inferred in many of the small, dark molecular clouds, the starless cores, that are the precursors to protostars. The oscillations provide significant internal energy and the time scale for…
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,…
I review theoretical models of star formation and how they apply across the stellar mass spectrum. Several distinct theories are under active study for massive star formation, especially Turbulent Core Accretion, Competitive Accretion and…
In dense starless and protostellar cores, the relative abundance of deuterated species to their non-deuterated counterparts can become orders of magnitude greater than in the local interstellar medium. This enhancement proceeds through…
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…
Star formation occurs within dense regions of giant molecular clouds (GMCs), however, exactly how gas collects and evolves to form individual stars and what role dense cores play remains unclear. We use the Lagrangian cell information in…
Low-mass stars are generally understood to form by the gravitational collapse of the dense molecular clouds known as starless cores. Continuum observations have not been able to distinguish among the several different hypotheses that…
Physical conditions that could render a core starless(in the local Universe) is the subject of investigation in this work. To this end we studied the evolution of four starless cores, B68, L694-2, L1517B, L1689, and L1521F, a VeLLO. The…
Our current understanding of the physical processes of star formation is reviewed, with emphasis on processes occurring in molecular clouds like those observed nearby. The dense cores of these clouds are predicted to undergo gravitational…