Related papers: Dynamically triggered star formation in giant mole…
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…
Following the recent insight in the material structure of comets, protoplanetesimals are assumed to have low densities and to be highly porous agglomerates. It is still unclear if planetesimals can be formed from these objects by…
We investigated numerically the dust growth driven by Brownian motion in a proto-planetary disc around a solar-type young stellar object. This process is considered as the first stage in the transformation of the initially micron-sized…
Stars are often observed to form in clusters. It is therefore important to understand how such a region of concentrated mass is assembled out of the diffuse medium and its properties eventually prescribe the important physical mechanisms…
We investigate the effect of star formation and diffuse photoelectric heating on the properties of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) formed in high resolution (~< 10 pc) global (~ 20 kpc) simulations of isolated Milky Way-type galaxy disks. The…
(Edited) Many fast rotator stars (rotation periods of < 2 days) are found in unresolved binaries with separations of tens of au. This correlation leads to the question of whether the formation of binary stars inherently produces fast…
In this review, I present the case for how massive stars may form through stellar collisions. This mechanism requires very high stellar densities, up to 4 orders of magnitude higher than are observed in the cores of dense young clusters. In…
We use resistive magnetohydrodynamical simulations with the nested grid technique to study the formation of protoplanetary disks around protostars from molecular cloud cores that provide the realistic environments for planet formation. We…
Over the last two decades, realistic studies have often concluded that the first bound objects to form can be very small, much smaller than a solar mass. After recombination, the Jeans mass drops rapidly to the order of a Giant Molecular…
A primary production mechanism for blue stragglers in globular clusters is thought to be collisionally-induced mergers, perhaps mediated by dynamical encounters involving binary stars. We model the formation and evolution of such blue…
All stars are born in molecular clouds, and most in giant molecular clouds (GMCs), which thus set the star formation activity of galaxies. We first review their observed properties, including measures of mass surface density, Sigma, and…
Different from Milky-Way-like galaxies, discs of gas-rich galaxies are clumpy. It is believed that the clumps form because of gravitational instability. However, a necessary condition for gravitational instability to develop is that the…
Criteria for gravitational collapse of expanding shells in rotating, shearing galaxy disks were determined using three-dimensional numerical simulations in the thin shell approximation. The simulations were run over a grid of 7 independent…
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…
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…
We present simulation results for the formation and long-term evolution of a primordial protostellar disk harbored by a first star. Using a 2+1D nonaxisymmetric thin disk numerical simulation, together with a barotropic relation for the…
We perform high resolution simulations of forming star clusters as they merge inside giant molecular clouds (GMCs) using hydrodynamics coupled to N-body dynamics to simultaneously model both the gas and stars. We zoom in to previously run…
We present two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of self-gravitating protostellar disks subject to axisymmetric infall from envelopes and irradiation from the central star, to explore disk fragmentation due to gravitational instability…
Super-sonic turbulence fragments molecular clouds (MC) into a very complex density field with density contrasts of several orders of magnitude. A fraction of the gas is locked into dense and gravitationally bound cores, which collapse as…
We employ the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE-2) physics model to study how the properties of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) evolve during galaxy mergers. We conduct a pixel-by-pixel analysis of molecular gas properties in both the…