Related papers: Starless Cores
Recent progress in the understanding of star formation is summarized. A consistent picture is emerging where molecular clouds form with turbulent velocity fields and clumpy substructure, imprinted already during their formation. The clouds…
Stars form within dense cores composed of both gas and dust within molecular clouds. However, despite the crucial role that dust plays in the star formation process, its dynamics is frequently overlooked, with the common assumption being a…
In this paper we present the results of a systematic investigation of an entire population of starless dust cores within a single molecular cloud. Analysis of extinction data shows the cores to be dense objects characterized by a narrow…
To characterize the initial conditions for intermediate- to high-mass star formation, we observed two Infrared Dark Clouds (IRDCs) that remain absorption features up to 70mum wavelength, with the PdBI in the 3.23mm dust continuum as well as…
The formation mechanism of massive stars remains one of the main open problems in astrophysics, in particular the relationship between the mass of the most massive stars, and that of the cores in which they form. Numerical simulations of…
To understand the formation of stars from clouds of molecular gas, one essentially needs to know two things: What gas collapses, and how long it takes to do so. We address these questions by embedding pseudo-Lagrangian tracer particles in…
The temperature and density structure of molecular cloud cores are the most important physical quantities that determine the course of the protostellar collapse and the properties of the stars they form. Nevertheless, density profiles often…
The similarity between the mass and spatial distributions of pre-stellar gas cores in star-forming clouds and young stars in clusters provides strong circumstantial evidence that these gas cores are the direct progenitors of individual…
The Pipe Nebula is a massive, nearby dark molecular cloud with a low star-formation efficiency which makes it a good laboratory to study the very early stages of the star formation process. The Pipe Nebula is largely filamentary, and…
Molecular clouds are a fundamental ingredient of galaxies: they are the channels that transform the diffuse gas into stars. The detailed process of how they do it is not completely understood. We review the current knowledge of molecular…
Starless molecular cores are natural laboratories for interstellar molecular chemistry research. The chemistry of ices in such objects was investigated with a three-phase (gas, surface, and mantle) model. We considered the center part of…
The standard interstellar ratio of deuterium to hydrogen (D/H) atoms is $\sim 1.5 \times 10^{-5}$. However, the deuterium fractionation is in fact found to be enhanced, to different degrees, in cold, dark cores, hot cores around massive…
The formation of stellar clusters dictates the pace at which galaxies evolve, and solving the question of their formation will undoubtedly lead to a better understanding of the Universe as a whole. While it is well known that star clusters…
Sufficiently massive clumps of molecular gas collapse under self-gravity and fragment to spawn a cluster of stars that have a range of masses. We investigate observationally the early stages of formation of a stellar cluster in a massive…
We aim at characterising dense cores in the clustered environments associated with massive star-forming regions. For this, we present an uniform analysis of VLA NH3(1,1) and (2,2) observations towards a sample of 15 massive star-forming…
We present a study of dense structures in the L1495 filament in the Taurus Molecular Cloud and examine its star-forming properties. In particular we construct a dust extinction map of the filament using deep near-infrared observations,…
We carry out an ALMA $\rm N_2D^+$(3-2) and 1.3~mm continuum survey towards 32 high mass surface density regions in seven Infrared Dark Clouds with the aim of finding massive starless cores, which may be the initial conditions for the…
On galactic scales, the surface density of star formation appears to be well correlated with the surface density of molecular gas. This has lead many authors to suggest that there exists a causal relationship between the chemical state of…
We present results of our study on eight dense cores, previously classified as starless, using infrared (3-160 {\micron}) imaging observations with \textit{AKARI} telescope and molecular line (HCN and N$_2$H$^+$) mapping observations with…
We present a novel approach to the riddle of star cluster multiple populations. Stars form from molecular cores. But not all cores form stars. Following their initial compression, such 'failed' cores re-expand, rather than collapsing. We…