The Earliest Stages of Star Formation: Protostars and Dense Cores

Details The Earliest Stages of Star Formation: Protostars and Dense Cores The Earliest Stages of Star Formation: Protostars and Dense Cores

Jul 2001

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001esasp.460..169a&link_type=abstract

The Promise of the Herschel Space Observatory. Eds. G.L. Pilbratt, J. Cernicharo, A.M. Heras, T. Prusti, & R. Harris. ESA-SP 460

Computer Science

Molecular Clouds, Stars: Formation, Stars: Mass Distribution, Missions: First/Herschel

Scientific paper

Despite recent progress, both the earliest stages of individual protostellar collapse and the origin of the global stellar initial mass function (IMF) are poorly understood. Since pre-stellar condensations and young protostars have Tbol ~< 30 K and emit the bulk of their luminosity in the 80-350 microns band, a large far-infrared and submillimeter space telescope such as FIRST/Herschel is needed to make further advances in this area. In particular, FIRST will provide a unique probe of the energy budget and temperature structure of pre/proto-stellar condensations. With an angular resolution at 85-300 microns comparable to, or better than, the largest ground-based millimeter radiotelescopes, the two imaging instruments of FIRST (i.e., PACS and SPIRE) will make possible deep, unbiased surveys for such condensations in the nearby (d ~< 0.5-1 kpc) molecular cloud complexes of the Galaxy. These surveys will provide, for the first time, the mass and luminosity functions of complete samples of cold pre-stellar condensations, comprising thousands of objects down to substellar masses. This should greatly help improve our understanding of the fragmentation origin of the IMF.

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