Related papers: Was The Sun Born In A Massive Cluster?
Most stars are formed in a cluster or association, where the number density of stars can be high. This means that a large fraction of initially-single stars will undergo close encounters with other stars and/or exchange into binaries. We…
The Scattered Disk Objects (SDOs) are a population of trans-Neptunian bodies with semimajor axes $50< a \lesssim 1000$ au and perihelion distances $q \gtrsim 30$ au. The detached SDOs with orbits beyond the reach of Neptune (roughly…
Observations suggest that star formation occurs in only one or two crossing times for a range of scales spanning a factor of 1000. These observations include (1) measurements of embedded cluster ages in comparison with the cloud core…
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…
Most stars form in star clusters and stellar associated. To understand the roles of star cluster environments in shaping the dynamical evolution of planetary systems, we carry out direct $N$-body simulations of four planetary systems models…
Stellar clusters are born embedded within giant molecular clouds (GMCs) and during their formation and early evolution are often only visible at infrared wavelengths, being heavily obscured by dust. Over the last 15 years advances in…
We present a catalog of near-infrared surveys of young (<= a few 10^6 yr) stellar groups and clusters within 1 kpc from the Sun, based on an extensive search of the literature from the past ten years. We find 143 surveys from 69 published…
Exoplanet surveys have confirmed one of humanity's (and all teenagers') worst fears: we are weird. If our Solar System were observed with present-day Earth technology -- to put our system and exoplanets on the same footing -- Jupiter is the…
Most planetary systems are formed within stellar clusters, and these environments can shape their properties. This paper considers scattering encounters between solar systems and passing cluster members, and calculates the corresponding…
We study the stellar cluster population in two adjacent fields in the nearby, face-on spiral galaxy, M83, using WFC3/HST imaging. The clusters are selected through visual inspection to be centrally concentrated, symmetric, and resolved on…
Young massive clusters are as young as open clusters but more massive and compact compared with typical open clusters. The formation process of young massive clusters is still unclear, and it is an open question whether the formation…
The planets of our solar system formed from a gas-dust disk. However, there are some properties of the solar system that are peculiar in this context. First, the cumulative mass of all objects beyond Neptune (TNOs) is only a fraction of…
We present the first coherent dynamical study of the cloud fragmentation-phase, collapse and early stellar evolution of a solar mass star. We determine young star properties as the consequence of the parent cloud evolution. Mass, luminosity…
We analyze the physical properties of stellar clusters that are detected in massive star-forming regions in the MYStIX project--a comparative, multiwavelength study of young stellar clusters within 3.6 kpc that contain at least one O-type…
Stellar clusters form by gravitational collapse of turbulent molecular clouds, with up to several thousand stars per cluster. They are thought to be the birthplace of most stars and therefore play an important role in our understanding of…
In the solar neighborhood, where the typical relaxation timescale is larger than the cosmic age, at least 10\% to 15\% of Sun-like stars have planetary systems with Jupiter-mass planets. In contrast, dense star clusters, charactered by…
Close encounters and physical collisions between stars in young dense clusters may lead to the formation of very massive stars and black holes via runaway merging. We examine critically some details of this process, using N-body simulations…
We use self-consistent numerical simulations of the evolution and disruption of the Sun's birth cluster in the Milky Way potential to investigate the present-day phase space distribution of the Sun's siblings. The simulations include the…
The Sun is located in a low-density region of the interstellar medium partially filled with hot gas that is the likely result of several nearby supernova explosions within the last 10 Myr. Here we use astrometric data to show that part of…
The formation of massive stars is one of the major unsolved problems in stellar astrophysics. However, only few if any of these are found as single stars, on average massive stars have more than one companion. Many of them are born in dense…