Related papers: The Nature and Nurture of Star Clusters
Young stars form on a wide range of scales, producing aggregates and clusters with various degrees of gravitational self-binding. The loose aggregates have a hierarchical structure in both space and time that resembles interstellar…
Clusters are the dense inner regions of a wide-spread hierarchy of young stellar structures. They often reveal a continuation of this hierarchy inside of them, to smaller scales, when they are young, but orbital mixing eventually erases…
Star formation occurs in hierarchical patterns in both space and time. Galaxies form large regions on the scale of the interstellar Jeans length and these large regions apparently fragment into giant molecular clouds and cloud cores in a…
Recent surveys of star forming regions have shown that most stars, and probably all massive stars, are born in dense stellar clusters. The mechanism by which a molecular cloud fragments to form several hundred to thousands of individual…
Young stellar groupings and clusters have hierarchical patterns ranging from flocculent spiral arms and star complexes on the largest scale to OB associations, OB subgroups, small loose groups, clusters and cluster subclumps on the smallest…
An overview of our current understanding of the formation and evolution of star clusters is given, with main emphasis on high-mass clusters. Clusters form deeply embedded within dense clouds of molecular gas. Left-over gas is cleared within…
We discuss the mechanism of cluster formation in hierarchically collapsing molecular clouds. Recent evidence, both observational and numerical, suggests that molecular clouds (MCs) may be undergoing global, hierarchical gravitational…
Star clusters stand at the intersection of much of modern astrophysics: the interstellar medium, gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, and cosmology. Here we review observations and theoretical models for the formation, evolution, and…
The concept that stars form in the modern era began some 60 years ago with the key observation of expanding OB associations. Now we see that these associations are an intermediate scale in a cascade of hierarchical structures that begins on…
Star clusters form in dense, hierarchically collapsing gas clouds. Bulk kinetic energy is transformed to turbulence with stars forming from cores fed by filaments. In the most compact regions, stellar feedback is least effective in removing…
The distribution of the number of clusters as a function of mass M and age T suggests that clusters get eroded or dispersed in a regular way over time, such that the cluster number decreases inversely as an approximate power law with T…
In the first part of this article, we review observations of the mass and luminosity functions of young and old star cluster systems. We also review some of the physical processes that may determine the characteristic mass of globular…
We review progress in numerical simulations of star cluster formation. These simulations involve the bottom-up assembly of clusters through hierarchical mergers, which produces a fractal stellar distribution at young (~0.5 Myr) ages. The…
Most star complexes are in fact complexes of stars, clusters and gas clouds; term "star complexes" was introduced as general one disregarding the preferential content of a complex. Generally the high rate of star formation in a complex is…
The discovery of young globular clusters in merging galaxies and other environments provides an opportunity to study directly the process of globular cluster formation. Empirically it appears that globular cluster formation occurs…
In about 40% of the Local Group galaxies star clusters have been detected so far, but the census is still incomplete. The properties of these clusters are briefly reviewed, and the impact of galaxy environment on the evolution and survival…
We present an analysis of the positions and ages of young star clusters in eight local galaxies to investigate the connection between the age difference and separation of cluster pairs. We find that star clusters do not form uniformly but…
Star clusters are observed to form in a highly compact state and with low star-formation efficiencies, and only 10 per cent of all clusters appear to survive to middle- and old-dynamical age. If the residual gas is expelled on a dynamical…
Their ubiquity and extreme densities make star clusters probes of prime importance of galaxy evolution. Old globular clusters keep imprints of the physical conditions of their assembly in the early Universe, and younger stellar objects,…
Most star complexes are in fact complexes of stars, clusters and gas clouds; term "star complexes" was introduced as general one disregarding the preferential content of a complex. Generally the high rate of star formation in a complex is…