Molecular Clouds: Fragmentation, Modeling and Observations

摘要

Molecular clouds are important astrophysical objects on theirown and are also the sites of stellar formation. We cannot expect to have asolid knowledge of the star formation process if we do not understand molecularclouds. I will summarize recent observational and theoretical results on the massspectrum of molecular clouds and the individual structure of cores and will em-phasize problems where the new millimeter and sub-millimeter interferometersare expected to have a major impact.