Poster abstract
The story of protostellar cores.
Abstract
The evolution of protostellar cores towards their final stellar mass depends on two major factors; the intrinsic properties of the core, and those of the environment. In this talk I shall discuss both these regimes.
Firstly I shall present a detailed analysis of the structures of collapsing cores from a large simulation, and show that three quarters of them are better described as filaments than as spheroids. Possible consequences of this include; departures from the expected line profiles, accretion being more difficult to stop with feedback, and an increased likelihood of core fragmentation. Further, the flow of accreted material from the environment onto the core, is highly asymmetric, with most of the accretion occurring along a few dense accretion streams.
Secondly I shall discuss the effect of the surrounding environment using a simulated GMC. In unbound regions of the molecular cloud there is distributed star formation with an efficiency as low as 1/%, but in bound regions star clusters can form with an efficiency of up to 40/%. Intriguingly there is a difference in the final stellar masses formed from the cores in both regions. In the clustered regions a full IMF is formed, but in the distributed regions the stellar masses cluster around the local Jeans mass and lack both low and high mass stars.
Firstly I shall present a detailed analysis of the structures of collapsing cores from a large simulation, and show that three quarters of them are better described as filaments than as spheroids. Possible consequences of this include; departures from the expected line profiles, accretion being more difficult to stop with feedback, and an increased likelihood of core fragmentation. Further, the flow of accreted material from the environment onto the core, is highly asymmetric, with most of the accretion occurring along a few dense accretion streams.
Secondly I shall discuss the effect of the surrounding environment using a simulated GMC. In unbound regions of the molecular cloud there is distributed star formation with an efficiency as low as 1/%, but in bound regions star clusters can form with an efficiency of up to 40/%. Intriguingly there is a difference in the final stellar masses formed from the cores in both regions. In the clustered regions a full IMF is formed, but in the distributed regions the stellar masses cluster around the local Jeans mass and lack both low and high mass stars.