Related papers: Using young massive star clusters to understand st…
The first stars are believed to have formed a few hundred million years after the big bang in so-called dark matter minihalos with masses ~10^6 M_sun. Their radiation lit up the Universe for the first time, and the supernova explosions that…
Star formation is triggered in essentially three ways: (1) the pressures from existing stars collect and squeeze nearby dense gas into gravitationally unstable configurations, (2) random compression from supersonic turbulence makes new…
We present a new implementation of star formation in cosmological simulations, by considering star clusters as a unit of star formation. Cluster particles grow in mass over several million years at the rate determined by local gas…
A brief overview of recent advances in the study of star formation in the Galactic Center (GC) environment is presented. Particular attention is paid to new insights concerning the suppression of star formation in GC molecular clouds.…
Recent work has shown that the star formation-density relation -- in which galaxies with low star formation rates are preferentially found in dense environments -- is still in place at z~1, but the situation becomes less clear at higher…
Observations and cosmological simulations indicate that the early Universe hosted numerous compact, high-density stellar systems, where close encounters and physical collisions between stars were likely common. We develop a bottom-up…
The history of galaxy formation via star formation and stellar mass assembly rates is now known with some certainty, yet the connection between high redshift and low redshift galaxy populations is not yet clear. By identifying and studying…
Numerical simulations of a Milky Way-size galaxy demonstrate that globular clusters with the properties similar to observed can form naturally at z > 3 in the concordance Lambda-CDM cosmology. The clusters in our model form in the strongly…
We investigate the effects of radiation pressure from stars on the survival of the star-forming giant clumps in high-redshift massive disc galaxies, during the most active phase of galaxy formation. The clumps, typically of mass ~10^8-10^9…
We present a model for the formation of massive ($M > 10 M_\odot$) stars through accretion-induced collisions in the cores of embedded dense stellar clusters. This model circumvents the problem of accreting onto a star whose luminosity is…
The conversion of gas into stars is a fundamental process in astrophysics and cosmology. Stars are known to form from the gravitational collapse of dense clumps in interstellar molecular clouds, and it has been proposed that the resulting…
We present a suite of galaxy formation simulations that directly model star cluster formation and disruption. Starting from a model previously developed by our group, here we introduce several improvements to the prescriptions for cluster…
Young associations provide a record that traces the star formation process, and the youngest populations connect progenitor gas dynamics to the resulting stellar populations. We therefore conduct the first comprehensive overview of the…
The formation of globular clusters (GCs) remains one of the main unsolved problems in star and galaxy formation. The past decades have seen important progress in constraining the physics of GC formation from a variety of directions. In this…
Star clusters have hierarchical patterns in space and time, suggesting formation processes in the densest regions of a turbulent interstellar medium. Clusters also have hierarchical substructure when they are young, which makes them all…
Most stars do not form in isolation but as part of a cluster comprising anywhere between a few dozen to several million stars with stellar densities ranging from 0.01 to several 10$^5$ \Msun pc$^{-3}$. The majority of these clusters…
Nuclear star clusters are among the densest stellar systems known and are common in both early- and late-type galaxies. They exhibit scaling relations with their host galaxy which may be related to those of supermassive black holes. These…
Dense environments have an impact on the star formation rate of galaxies. As stars form from molecular gas, looking at the cold molecular gas content of a galaxy gives useful insights on its efficiency in forming stars. However, most…
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…
In this thesis we have identified two star formation sites for star formation in galaxies which differ widely in metal content. We conclude that `massive' star formation that occurs in a high density, high metallicity environment, like that…