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Starless cores seem to be well described as
self-gravitating clouds that are supported mostly
by thermal pressure. In this talk I show how
we develop a model for the thermal and dynamical
evolution of starless cores that includes
hydrodynamics, the radiative transfer of the gas
and dust, and simple CO chemistry. The models show
different dynamical behaviors including collapse
and internal oscillations and different temperature
and density structures depending mainly on the core
mass and density. The models suggest that the starless
cores can be usefully divided into two categories,
thermally subcritical and thermally supercritical.
The different properties of each of the two categories
are useful in understanding observations of starless
cores and predicting their future evolution.
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