Related papers: Starless Cores
Star formation involves the flow of gas and dust within molecular clouds into protostars and young stellar objects (YSOs) due to gravity. Along the way, these flows are shaped significantly by many other mechanisms, including pressure,…
Studying the physical environments of low mass and high mass cores using dust continuum emission provides important observational constraints on theoretical models of star formation. The motivation and procedure for modeling dust continuum…
The thermal and chemical evolution of gravitationally collapsing protostellar clouds is investigated, focusing attention on their dependence on metallicity. Calculations are carried out for a range of metallicities spanning the local…
We recently proposed that molecular cloud dense cores undergo a prolonged period of quasi-static contraction prior to true collapse. This theory could explain the observation that many starless cores exhibit, through their spectral line…
We have performed fully 3D simulations of the collapse of molecular cloud cores which obey the logatropic equation of state. By following the collapse of these cores from states of near hydrodynamic equilibrium, we are able to produce…
We have undertaken a survey of N2H+ and N2D+ towards 31 low-mass starless cores using the IRAM 30m telescope. Our main objective has been to determine the abundance ratio of N2D+ and N2H+ towards the nuclei of these cores and thus to obtain…
The star formation history of galaxies is a complex process usually considered to be stochastic in nature, for which we can only give average descriptions such as the color-density relation. In this work we follow star-forming gas particles…
(Abridged) We present a series of decaying turbulence simulations that represent a cluster-forming clump within a molecular cloud, investigating the role of magnetic fields on the formation of potential star-forming cores. We present an…
A model of core-clump accretion with equally likely stopping describes star formation in the dense parts of clusters, where models of isolated collapsing cores may not apply. Each core accretes at a constant rate onto its protostar, while…
We investigate, through a series of numerical calculations, the evolution of dense cores that are accreting external gas up to and beyond the point of star formation. Our model clouds are spherical, unmagnetized configurations with fixed…
Stars are born from dense cores in molecular clouds. Observationally, it is crucial to capture the formation of cores in order to understand the necessary conditions and rate of the star formation process. The {\it Atacama Large Mm/sub-mm…
The efficiency of star formation, defined as the ratio of the stellar to total (gas and stellar) mass, is observed to vary from a few percent in regions of dispersed star formation to about a third in cluster-forming cores. This difference…
Stars mostly form in groups consisting of a few dozen to several ten thousand members. For 30 years, theoretical models provide a basic concept of how such star clusters form and develop: they originate from the gas and dust of collapsing…
We investigate the sources and amount of dust in early galaxies. We discuss dust nucleation in stellar atmospheres using published extended atmosphere models, stellar evolution tracks and nucleation conditions and conclude that the (TPAGB)…
Star formation is a series of mass assembly processes and starless cores, those cold and dense condensations in molecular clouds, play a pivotal role as initial seeds of stars. With only a limited sample of known starless cores, however,…
Dense pockets of cold, molecular gas precede the formation of stars. During their infancy and later phases of evolution, stars inject considerable energy into the interstellar medium by driving shocks either due to ionising radiation or…
Stellar clusters are born in cold and dusty molecular clouds and the youngest clusters are embedded to various degrees in dusty dark molecular material. Such embedded clusters can be considered protocluster systems. The most deeply buried…
Over the past decade increasingly robust estimates of the dense molecular gas content in galaxy populations between redshift 0 and the peak of cosmic galaxy/star formation from redshift 1-3 have become available. This rapid progress has…
My thesis work aims to study the inter-relation between various physical and chemical conditions in a wide range of astrophysical environments. Our studied regions range from the super-hot regions (i.e., nebular, photon-dominated, or…
A large fraction of the gas in the Galaxy is cold, dense, and molecular. If all this gas collapsed under the influence of gravity and formed stars in a local free-fall time, the star formation rate in the Galaxy would exceed that observed…