Related papers: Shock-induced star cluster formation in colliding …
Sufficiently massive clumps of molecular gas collapse under self-gravity and fragment to spawn a cluster of stars that have a range of masses. We investigate observationally the early stages of formation of a stellar cluster in a massive…
Young massive stars in the central parsec of our Galaxy are best explained by star formation within at least one, and possibly two, massive self-gravitating gaseous discs. With help of numerical simulations, we here consider whether the…
We perform a high resolution zoom-in simulation of star cluster assembly including the merger of two sub-clusters with initial conditions taken from previous large scale giant molecular cloud (GMC) simulations. We couple hydrodynamics to…
I review some important questions in the field of massive star formation: What are the initial conditions for proto star clusters and how do they arise? What are the initial conditions for individual massive star formation within star…
Using three fiducial Nbody+SPH simulations, we follow the merging of two disk galaxies with a hot gaseous halo component each, and examine whether the merger remnant can be a spiral galaxy. The stellar progenitor disks are destroyed by…
We present results of hydrodynamic simulations of star formation triggered by cloud-cloud collisions. During the early stages of star formation, low-mass objects form by gravitational instabilities in protostellar discs. A number of these…
(Abridged) The building blocks of galaxies are star clusters. These form with low-star formation efficiencies and, consequently, loose a large part of their stars that expand outwards once the residual gas is expelled by the action of the…
The formation environment of stars in massive stellar clusters is similar to the environment of stars forming in galaxies at a redshift of 1 - 3, at the peak star formation rate density of the Universe. As massive clusters are still forming…
We report on a study of young star cluster complexes in the spiral galaxy M51. Recent studies have confirmed that star clusters do not form in isolation, but instead tend to form in larger groupings or complexes. We use {\it HST} broad and…
Young massive clusters (YMCs) are recently formed astronomical objects with unusually high star formation rates. We propose the collision of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) as a likely formation mechanism of YMCs, consistent with the YMC…
In this contribution we review our recent numerical work discussing the essential role of the local cluster environment in assembling massive stars. First we show that massive stars are formed from low mass pre-stellar cores and become…
The inner parsec of our Galaxy contains tens of Wolf-Rayet stars whose powerful outflows are constantly interacting while filling the region with hot, diffuse plasma. Theoretical models have shown that, in some cases, the collision of…
A Lagrangian, particle-based numerical method (tree code gravity plus smoothed particle hydrodynamics) was used to simulate clump-clump collisions occurring within GMCs. The collisions formed shock-compressed layers, out of which condensed…
A luminous X-ray source is associated with a cluster (MGG-11) of young stars \~200pc from the center of the starburst galaxy M82. The properties of the X-ray source are best explained by a black hole with a mass of at least 350Msun, which…
Collisions between giant molecular clouds (GMCs) have been proposed as a mechanism to trigger massive star and star cluster formation. To investigate the astrochemical signatures of such collisions, we carry out 3D magnetohydrodynamics…
The clustered nature of star formation should produce a high degree of structure in the combined phase and chemical space in the Galactic disk. To date, observed structure of this kind has been mostly limited to bound clusters and moving…
We propose that bound, young massive stellar clusters form from dense clouds that have escape speeds greater than the sound speed in photo-ionized gas. In these clumps, radiative feedback in the form of gas ionization is bottled up,…
The enormous radiative and mechanical luminosities of massive stars impact a vast range of scales and processes, from the reionization of the universe, to the evolution of galaxies, to the regulation of the interstellar medium, to the…
The star formation history of galaxies is a complex process usually considered to be stochastic in nature, for which we can only give average descriptions such as the color-density relation. In this work we follow star-forming gas particles…
Massive Galactic clusters (> 1000 Msun) exhibit a clear correlation between cluster density, size and age and can be sorted in two categories, i.e. starburst and leaky clusters. The reason for the existance of two types of massive clusters…