EPoS Contribution
EPoS Contribution
The Role of Filaments for Core Formation

Fabian Heitsch
The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, US
"Molecular clouds are filamentary" - with this statement one certainly cannot go wrong, especially given the recent - abundant - observational evidence for filamentary molecular cloud structure. Yet does the filaments' role in how protostellar cores form depend on how they themselves form? I will summarize past and present theoretical studies of fragmentation and filament formation, emphasizing the physical conditions of the filaments, and the consequences of these conditions on core formation. I will attempt to identify inconsistencies between our theoretical understanding and observations, highlighting the underlying assumptions in the theoretical work and how they may (or may not) affect the results.