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Competitive accretion, a process to explain the origin of the IMF, occurs when stars in a common gravitational potential accrete from a distributed gaseous component. We show that concerns recently raised on the efficiency of competitive accretion are incorrect as they use globally averaged properties which are inappropriate for the detailed physics of a forming stellar cluster. A full treatment requires a realistic treatment of the cluster potential, the distribution of turbulent velocities and gas densities. Accreting gas does not travel at the global virial velocity of the system due to the velocity-sizescale relation inherent in turbulent gas and due to the lower velocity dispersion of small-N clusters in which much of the accretion occurs. Stars located in the gas-rich centres of such systems initially accrete from low relative velocity gas attaining larger masses before needing to accrete the higher velocity gas. Stars not in the centres of such potentials, or that enter the cluster later when the velocity dispersion is higher, do not accrete significantly and thus retain their low-masses. In competitive accretion, most stars do not continue to accrete significantly such that their masses are set from the fragmentation process. It is the few stars which continue to accrete that become higher-mass stars. Competitive accretion is therefore likely to be responsible for the formation of higher-mass stars and can explain the mass distribution, mass segregation and binary frequency of these stars. Global kinematics of competitive accretion models include large-scale mass infall, with mean inflow velocities of order 0.5 km/s at scales of 0.5 pc, but infall signatures are likely to be confused by the large tangential velocities and the velocity dispersion present.
There are now two dominant models of how stars form: gravitational collapse theory holds that star-forming molecular clumps, typically hundreds to thousands of solar masses in mass, fragment into gaseous cores that subsequently collapse to make indiv
We discuss the effects of the magnetic field observed in molecular clouds on the process of star formation, concentrating on the phase of gravitational collapse of low-mass dense cores, cradles of sunlike stars. We summarize recent analytic work and
Cosmological numerical simulations of galaxy evolution show that accretion of metal-poor gas from the cosmic web drives the star formation in galaxy disks. Unfortunately, the observational support for this theoretical prediction is still indirect, an
We analyse column density and temperature maps derived from Herschel dust continuum observations of a sample of massive infrared dark clouds (G11.11-0.12, G18.82-0.28, G28.37+0.07, G28.53-0.25). We disentangle the velocity structure of the clouds usi
We present results from our numerical simulations of collapsing massive molecular cloud cores. These numerical calculations show that massive stars assemble quickly with mass accretion rates exceeding 10^-3 Msol/yr and confirm that the mass accretion