The Evolution of Star-Forming Cores in Molecular Clouds: Using Theoretical Models to Inform Observations

In this talk I will begin with a brief history of star formation studies at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and then will discuss two recent investigations  that I have performed with graduate students and collaborators. The first investigation, with graduate student Steve Mairs, compares the formation of starless and protostellar cores in simulations with observations of cores real molecular clouds. We find that in hydrodynamic simulations the thermal Jeans instability measure can be used to predict the presence of protostars within cores and that the instantaneous mass of the core is not a great predictor of the final mass of the star. In the second investigation, we consider how a protostellar envelope should react to changes in the accretion luminosity of the deeply embedded protostar and how time-domain observations of the bolometric luminosity and spectral energy distribution might provide critical measures related to the underlying physics responsible for accretion.