No description available.

Compact substructure is expected to arise in a starless core as mass becomes concentrated in the central region likely to form a protostar. Additionally, multiple peaks may form if fragmentation occurs. We present Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Cycle 2 observations of 60 starless and protostellar cores in the Ophiuchus molecular cloud. We detect eight compact substructures which are >15 '' from the nearest Spitzer young stellar object. Only one of these has strong evidence for being truly starless after considering ancillary data, e.g., from Herschel and X-ray telescopes. An additional extended emission structure has tentative evidence for starlessness. The number of our detections is consistent with estimates from a combination of synthetic observations of numerical simulations and analytical arguments. This result suggests that a similar ALMA study in the Chamaeleon. I cloud, which detected no compact substructure in starless cores, may be due to the peculiar evolutionary state of cores in that cloud.

Not available / text

Not available / text

Not available / text

Not available / text

Not available / text

Not available / text

The thesis goes on to extend the work of Bretherton (2003) and Moore et al. (2007) on the W3 Giant Molecular Cloud, by performing NH3 follow up of a sample of the cores discovered in the 850um SCUBA map and observing the whole cloud in 13CO(J=1-0) and C18O(J=1-0). - The NH3(1,1) and NH3(2,2) observations of the SCUBA cores used the fact that NH3 only traces the densest regions of the cloud, and hence can be used to find the temperature and kinematics of the cores themselves. This was used to test if the individual cores were virially bound, and from this find if cores in the more densely star-forming region of the cloud (High-Density Layer, HDL) were more likely to be bound than those in the Low-Density Layer (LDL). There are a mixture of virially bound and unbound cores in both the HDL and the LDL but no statistical difference in ratio of these between the two regions. This has an important bearing on models of environmentally-dependent star-formation, which divide into two categories; those, such as Collect and Collapse (Dale et al., 2007), which state that external pressures create dense structure, and those such as Radiatively- Driven Instability (RD I) (Bertoldi, 1989), which state that those external pressures cause dense structure to collapse. The evidence from this thesis favours models in which dense structure is created according to the Collect and Collapse scenario.

Class I protostars are thought to represent an early stage in the lifetime of protoplanetary disks, when they are still embedded in their natal envelope. Here we measure the disk masses of 10 Class I protostars in the Taurus Molecular Cloud to constrain the initial mass budget for forming planets in disks. We use radiative transfer modeling to produce synthetic protostar observations and fit the models to a multi-wavelength data set using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo fitting procedure. We fit these models simultaneously to our new Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy 1.3 mm observations that are sensitive to the wide range of spatial scales that are expected from protostellar disks and envelopes so as to be able to distinguish each component, as well as broadband spectral energy distributions compiled from the literature. We find a median disk mass of 0.018 M-circle dot on average, more massive than the Taurus Class II disks, which have median disk mass of similar to 0.0025 M-circle dot. This decrease in disk mass can be explained if dust grains have grown by a factor of 75 in grain size, indicating that by the Class II stage, at a few Myr, a significant amount of dust grain processing has occurred. However, there is evidence that significant dust processing has occurred even during the Class I stage, so it is likely that the initial mass budget is higher than the value quoted here.