Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2003-01-19
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
33 pages, incl. 11 figures, to appear in Reviews of Modern Astronomy, Vol. 16 (high-resolution version at http://www.aip.de/
Scientific paper
Understanding the star formation process is central to much of modern astrophysics. For several decades it has been thought that stellar birth is primarily controlled by the interplay between gravity and magnetostatic support, modulated by ambipolar diffusion. Recently, however, both observational and numerical work has begun to suggest that supersonic interstellar turbulence rather than magnetic fields controls star formation. Supersonic turbulence can provide support against gravitational collapse on global scales, while at the same time it produces localized density enhancements that allow for collapse on small scales. The efficiency and timescale of stellar birth in Galactic molecular clouds strongly depend on the properties of the interstellar turbulent velocity field, with slow, inefficient, isolated star formation being a hallmark of turbulent support, and fast, efficient, clustered star formation occurring in its absence.
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