It appears that most stars are born in clusters, and that at birth most stars have circumstellar discs which are comparable in size to the separations between the stars. Interactions between ...neighbouring stars and discs are therefore likely to play a key role in determining disc lifetimes, stellar masses, and the separations and eccentricities of binary orbits. Such interactions may also cause fragmentation of the discs, thereby triggering the formation of additional stars. We have carried out a series of simulations of disc-star interactions using an SPH code which treats self-gravity, hydrodynamic and viscous forces. We find that interactions between discs and stars provide a mechanism for removing energy from, or adding energy to, the orbits of the stars, and for truncating the discs. However, capture during such encounters is unlikely to be an important binary formation mechanism. A more significant consequence of such encounters is that they can trigger fragmentation of the disc, via tidally and compressionally induced gravitational instabilities, leading to the formation of additional stars. When the disc-spins and stellar orbits are randomly oriented, encounters lead to the formation of new companions to the original star in 20% of encounters. If most encounters are prograde and coplanar, as suggested by simulations of dynamically-triggered star formation, then new companions are formed in approximately 50% of encounters.
We analyse and compare the clustering of young stars in Chamaeleon I and Taurus. We compute the mean surface-density of companion stars \bar{N} as a function of angular displacement \theta from each ...star. We then fit \bar{N}(\theta) with two simultaneous power laws. For Chamaeleon I, the exponents of the power laws are 1.97 and 0.28, with the elbow at ~0.011 degrees. For Taurus, we obtain 2.02 and 0.87, with the elbow at ~0.013 deg. For both star clusters the observational data make quite large systematic excursions from the best fitting curve in the binary regime. These excursions may be attributable to evolutionary effects of the types discussed recently by Nakajima et al. and Bate et al. In the clustering regime the data conform to the best fitting curve very well. We also calculate the box-dimensions for the two star clusters. However, the limited dynamic range makes these estimates simply descriptors of the large-scale clustering, and not admissible evidence for fractality. We also propose two algorithms for objectively generating maps of constant stellar surface-density in young star clusters. Such maps are useful for comparison with molecular-line and dust-continuum maps of star-forming clouds, and with the results of numerical simulations. These maps retain information which is suppressed in the evaluation of \bar{N}(\theta). Analyzing such maps can be used to discriminate between fractal structure and single-level clustering, and to determine the degree of central condensation in small-N clusters. Algorithm I uses a universal smoothing length, and therefore has a restricted dynamic range, but it is implicitly normalized. Algorithm II uses a local smoothing length, which gives it much greater dynamic range, but it has to be normalized explicitly.
