Related papers: Understanding Global Galactic Star Formation
The last two decades have seen remarkable progress in our long-standing goal of determining the abundance and diversity of worlds in the Galaxy. Understanding of this subject involves tracing the path of interstellar material from dense…
Protostars and young stars are strongly spatially "clustered" or "correlated" within their natal giant molecular clouds (GMCs). We demonstrate that such clustering leads to the conclusion that the incident bolometric radiative flux upon a…
The detection and characterization of protoplanets in protoplanetary disks around young stars is emerging as a transformative field that will redefine our understanding of how planetary systems form. While current facilities have revealed…
The primary concern of this thesis is to understand the formation and properties of the first galaxies, as well as the influence of the first stars in terms of radiative, mechanical and chemical feedback. In particular, we elucidate the…
The Planet Formation Imager (PFI) project aims to provide a strong scientific vision for ground-based optical astronomy beyond the upcoming generation of Extremely Large Telescopes. We make the case that a breakthrough in angular resolution…
Stars, and collections of stars, encode rich signatures of stellar physics and galaxy evolution. With properties influenced by both their environment and intrinsic nature, stars retain information about astrophysical phenomena that are not…
The star formation history of nearby early-type galaxies is investigated via numerical modelling. Idealized hydrodynamical N-body simulations with a star formation prescription are used to study the minor merger process between a giant…
Star formation is a complex multi-scale phenomenon that is of significant importance for astrophysics in general. Stars and star formation are key pillars in observational astronomy from local star forming regions in the Milky Way up to…
We investigate the effect of star formation and diffuse photoelectric heating on the properties of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) formed in high resolution (~< 10 pc) global (~ 20 kpc) simulations of isolated Milky Way-type galaxy disks. The…
The evolution of the star formation rate in the Galaxy is one of the key ingredients quantifying the formation and determining the chemical and luminosity evolution of galaxies. Many complementary methods exist to infer the star formation…
The observable characteristics and subsequent evolution of young stellar populations is dominated by their massive stars. As our understanding of those massive stars and the factors affecting their evolution improves, so our interpretation…
Using radiation-hydrodynamic cosmological simulations, we present a detailed ($0.1$ pc resolution), physically motivated portrait of a typical-mass dwarf galaxy before the epoch of reionization, resolving the formation and evolution of star…
The Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) will gather unprecedented spectro-photometric data on galaxies out to the highest redshifts. It is therefore crucial to identify the spectro-photometric diagnostics within reach of NGST, which will…
The physical and chemical conditions in young protoplanetary disks set the boundary conditions for planet formation. Although the dust in disks is relatively easily detected as a far-IR photometric ``excess'' over the expected photospheric…
Few scientific discoveries have captured the public imagination like the explosion of exoplanetary science during the past two decades. This work has fundamentally changed our picture of Earth's place in the Universe and led NASA to make…
Unless the nearby universe is subtly anomalous, it should contain a relatively normal selection of galaxies whose histories are representative of field galaxies in general throughout the Universe. We can therefore take advantage of our…
Star formation in relic HII regions of the first stars is investigated using magneto-hydrodynamical simulations with a nested grid method that covers 10 orders of magnitude in spatial scale and 20 orders of magnitude in density contrast.…
Quantification of the Galaxy's star formation history involves both the duration and the rate of formation, with these parameters being known with different precision for different populations. The early rate of star formation is knowable…
Circumstellar disks play an important role in many stages of the evolution of stars. However, it is only possible to directly image circumstellar disks for a few of the nearest stars. For massive stars, the situation is even more difficult,…
The expansion of HII regions can trigger the formation of stars. An overdensity of young stellar objects (YSOs) is observed at the edges of HII regions but the mechanisms that give rise to this phenomenon are not clearly identified.…