title: The Earliest Stages of Isolated Low-Mass Star Formation
creator: Schmalzl, Markus
subject: ddc-520
subject: 520 Astronomy and allied sciences
description: The knowledge of the initial conditions of low-mass star formation is a key to understand the process of protostellar collapse and protostar formation. This thesis focuses on the earliest stages of isolated low-mass star formation and covers spatial scales which spread over three orders of magnitude. It includes the study of a filament with a length of a few parsecs, down to the in-depth analysis of an isolated prestellar core, where structures of the order of a few hundred AU are resolved. In the first part, a NIR extinction map of the filament L 1495 reveals its small scale, highly fragmented structure, and a high star-forming potential in all its parts. In some regions, the initial filament collapse and fragmentation is still taking place and star formation is yet to occur, whereas in other parts, I identify a population of dense cores with separations of the order of the locals Jeans length, which are likely to collapse and form stars. The second part of the thesis focuses on the isolated core CB17, which hosts two sources at very different evolutionary stages (Class I vs. prestellar core) at a projected distance of only 5500AU. With the aid of FIR and (sub)mm observations of the dust emission, I determine its density and temperature structure and draw conclusions about the dust properties. Interferometric observations at high angular resolution reveal a complex velocity structure in the prestellar core, which might be result of interaction with the protostar.
date: 2010
type: Dissertation
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/11634/1/phd_schmalzl_submitted.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00011634
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-opus-116343
identifier:   Schmalzl, Markus  (2010) The Earliest Stages of Isolated Low-Mass Star Formation.  [Dissertation]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/11634/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng