A multicomponent model for computing the thermal structure of collapsing protostellar clouds

A model for simulating the thermal and dynamical evolution of protostellar clouds is presented. In the model, the dust and gas temperatures are treated separately, making it possible to more precisely describe the initial stages of the cloud’s gravitational contraction and collapse. The model is fast enough to be applied in hydrodynamical computations, and has a high enough accuracy for the results to be used to compute emission spectra and comparing them with observational data. Two problems are considered as test examples and simple applications: calculation of the structure of clouds in thermal and hydrostatic equilibrium, and modeling the evolution of a protostellar cloud in a spherically symmetric approximation, including the formation of the first hydrostatic core.