Related papers: Recurrent gas accretion by massive star clusters, …
Gas processes affecting star formation are reviewed with an emphasis on gravitational and magnetic instabilities as a source of turbulence. Gravitational instabilities are pervasive in a multi-phase medium, even for sub-threshold column…
Cosmic gas cycles in and out of galaxies, but outside of galaxies it is difficult to observe except for the absorption lines that circumgalactic clouds leave in the spectra of background quasars. Using photoionization modeling of those…
Magnetic stresses collimate protostellar winds into a common distribution of force with angle. Sweeping into the ambient medium, such winds drive bipolar molecular outflows whose properties are insensitive to the distribution of ambient gas…
The intergalactic gas in groups and clusters of galaxies bears the indelible stamp of galaxy formation. We present a comparison between observations and simple theoretical models indicating that radiative cooling governs the entropy scale…
We present hydrodynamic simulations of a major merger of disk galaxies, and study the ISM dynamics and star formation properties. High spatial and mass resolutions of 12pc and 4x10^4 M_sol allow to resolve cold and turbulent gas clouds…
The properties of old globular cluster systems (GCSs) in galaxy halos offer unique insight into the physical processes that conspire to form any generic star cluster, at any epoch. Presented here is a summary of the information obtained…
The interplay between the ISM and the massive stars formed in clusters and, more generally, in recent events of star formation is reviewed via the global effects each has on the other. The pre-existing environment affects the properties of…
Massive stars influence their surroundings through radiation, winds, and supernova explosions far out of proportion to their small numbers. However, the physical processes that initiate and govern the birth of massive stars remain poorly…
Disk galaxies are in hydrostatic equilibrium along their vertical axis. The pressure allowing for this configuration consists of thermal, turbulent, magnetic and cosmic ray components. For the Milky Way(MW) the thermal pressure contributes…
Most stars form in highly clustered environments within molecular clouds, but eventually disperse into the distributed stellar field population. Exactly how the stellar distribution evolves from the embedded stage into gas-free associations…
Dynamical evolution of spiral galaxies is strongly dependent on non-axisymmetric patterns that develop from gravitational instabilities, either spontaneously or externally triggered. Some evolutionary sequences are described through which a…
Feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) has often been invoked both in simulations and in interpreting observations for regulating star formation and quenching cooling flows in massive galaxies. AGN activity can, however, also…
We study gravitational instabilities in disks, with special attention to the most massive clumps that form because they are expected to be the progenitors of globular-type clusters. The maximum unstable mass is set by rotation and depends…
The central mass distribution of clusters of galaxies can be inferred from gravitationally lensed arcs with known redshifts. For the Abell cluster 2218, this method yields a core mass which is larger by a factor of $2.5 \pm 0.5$ than the…
We use the galaxy stellar mass and halo merger tree information from the semi-analytic model galaxy catalogue of Font et al. (2009) to examine the accretion of galaxies into a large sample of groups and clusters, covering a wide range in…
We examine the effects of ionization, radiation pressure and main sequence winds from massive stars on self-gravitating, clumpy molecular clouds, thereby modeling the formation and pre-supernova feedback of massive star clusters. We find…
We test the hypothesis that globular clusters form in supergiant molecular clouds within high-redshift galaxies. Numerical simulations demonstrate that such large, dense, and cold gas clouds assemble naturally in current hierarchical models…
The formation of massive stars is currently an unsolved problems in astrophysics. Understanding the formation of massive stars is essential because they dominate the luminous, kinematic, and chemical output of stars. Furthermore, their…
Understanding the star formation process is central to much of modern astrophysics. For several decades it has been thought that stellar birth is primarily controlled by the interplay between gravity and magnetostatic support, modulated by…
We examine gas accretion and subsequent star formation in representative galaxies from the McMaster Unbiased Galaxy Simulations (Stinson et al. 2010). Accreted gas is bimodal with a natural temperature division at $10^5$ K, near the peak of…