Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter JungeAG

Tuesday, 16 September 2025, 15:50

From filaments to cores: tracing accretion histories with tracer particles

Nuray Ortaköse
Universität zu Köln

Understanding how gas assembles into stars remains a central challenge in star formation theory, especially massive stars (> 8M⊙) . In my Bachelor's thesis, we investigated the accretion and fragmentation process from the simulation of a high-mass star-forming collapsing cloud, by using tracer particle data to retrieve the history of the gas evolution. We examined the reliability of passive tracers in capturing mass accretion and the spatial relationship to sink particles. Building on this, our current work explores new tracer-based methods to identify and track evolving structures such as filaments and dense cores. We use clustering algorithms and merger trees to follow the assembly history of tracer-defined groups over time. While the method is still under development, we aim to reconstruct the growth of protostellar cores and their connection to large-scale accretion flows. This talk will present both past findings and current methodological progress, illustrating how tracer particles can help bridge the gap between gas dynamics and star formation processes.