Matthew Bate (Exeter), Andreas Burkert (Muenchen)

Despite its importance for various areas of astrophysics, the physics of star formation is still poorly understood. It is generally accepted that stars and stellar clusters form in the turbulent, cold and molecular environments of molecular clouds. But there exists no consistent model that is able to predict when and with what efficiency a given molecular cloud would condense into stars, what stellar distribution it will produce (e.g. distributed, clustered, or the mixture), the properties of the stars (e.g. the initial mass function), and how the molecular cloud is disrupted by the newly formed stars.

Despite the lack of a consistent theoretical model, major progress has been made during the past 10 years both in modeling gravitational collapse and star formation in turbulent molecular environments, the evolution of the molecular web in galaxies, and the heating and disruption of molecular clouds by newly formed stars. Observations, most recently with Herschel and Scuba 2, provide detailed insight into the microphysics of star formation which now can be compared with theoretical models and numerical simulations.

Our session aims to bring together observers and theorists in order to discuss the recent new observations on star formation and confront them with numerical models and theories. The major topics to be covered are:

Formation and structure of turbulent molecular clouds in the multiphase ISM
Formation of stars and stellar clusters in turbulent molecular clouds
Stellar feedback processes and the disruption of molecular clouds