The Formation of Protostars

Abstract

The Jeans criterion derived in the foregoing section follows from a first-order perturbation theory and gives conditions under which perturbations of an equilibrium stage will grow exponentially. But the linear theory does not give information, for instance, about the fully developed collapse, to say nothing about the final product. For this, one has to follow the perturbation into the non-linear regime. We first begin with some very simple cases, assuming always spherical symmetry for the collapsing cloud.