Oral Presentation

Not turbulence nor magnetic fields: just global hierarchical collapse of clouds.

Author(s): Enrique Vazquez-Semadeni

Presenter: Enrique Vazquez-semadeni (IRyA UNAM)

Several apparent puzzles of the star formation process can be easily understood and explained in the context of the global and hierachical collapse of whole molecular clouds. In this case, gravity acts unrestricted, but the extremely nonlinear, non-homologous and non-isotropic nature of the collapse generates a multi-scale hierachy of structures that collapse within one another and on different timescales, causing the formation of filaments as intermediate structures, and originating the observed signatures of cores (such as Bonnor-Ebert-like density profiles and the appearance of pressure-confined stable cores) and of embedded star clusters (such as radial age and mass gradients and stellar-age distributions). Synthetic observations of simulations of collapsing cores suggest there is no conflict between the collapse process and the observed infall speeds.