The Formation of Distributed and Clustered Stars in Molecular Clouds

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent observational and theoretical advances in understanding how stars form in molecular clouds, emphasizing the roles of turbulence, magnetic fields, and feedback in shaping star formation processes and cluster development.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in understanding the macrophysics of star formation, integrating observations, theories, and the influence of turbulence and feedback mechanisms.

Findings

Turbulence supports clouds and creates dense structures for star formation.

Magnetic fields and feedback slow turbulence decay and regulate star formation rates.

Scaling laws for molecular clouds and star clusters are influenced by gravity and turbulence.

Abstract

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, we overview recent observational and theoretical progress toward understanding star formation on the scale of molecular clouds and complexes, i.e the macrophysics of star formation. We begin with an overview of recent surveys of young stellar objects (YSOs) in molecular clouds and embedded clusters, and we outline an emerging picture of cluster formation. We then discuss the role of turbulence to both support clouds and create dense, gravitationally unstable structures, with an emphasis on the role of magnetic fields (in the case of distributed stars) and feedback (in the case of clusters) to slow turbulent decay and mediate the rate and density of star formation. The discussion is followed by an overview of how gravity and turbulence may produce observed scaling laws for the properties of molecular clouds, stars and star clusters, and how the observed, low star formation rate may result from self regulated star formation. We end with some concluding remarks, including a number of questions to be addressed by future observations and simulations.