Related papers: A clustered origin for isolated massive stars
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…
A dense-enough gas-accumulation evolves, over a few Myr of intensifying star formation, to an embedded cluster. If it contains a sufficient amount of mass, O stars form and explosively expel the remaining gas, whereas poorer clusters reduce…
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…
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…
The formation of massive stars in close binary systems is complicated due to their high radiation pressure, the crowded environment and the expected minimum separation for fragmentation being many times greater than the orbital separation.…
Stars are forming in our galaxy at a rate of between 1 and 4 solar masses of stars per year. In contrast to elliptical galaxies, which are largely devoid of star formation, star formation is still going on in spiral galaxies because of…
Multiple stellar populations are observed in almost all globular-clusters, but the origin of this phenomenon is still debated. We investigate the role cool supergiants may have played. To do this, we combine two investigative methods:…
Young, massive star clusters are the most notable and significant end products of violent star-forming episodes triggered by galaxy collisions, mergers, and close encounters. The question remains, however, whether or not at least a fraction…
In two papers we try to confirm that all Galactic high-mass stars are formed in a cluster environment, by excluding that O-type stars found in the Galactic field actually formed there. In de Wit et al. (2004) we presented deep K-band…
The observational consequences of the merger scenario for massive star formation are explored and contrasted with the gradual accumulation of mass by accretion. Protostellar mergers may produce high luminosity infrared flares lasting years…
Close encounters and physical collisions between stars in young dense clusters can result in new channels for stellar evolution, and may lead to the formation of very massive stars and black holes via runaway merging. We present some…
We study the formation and early evolution of star clusters that have a wide range of masses and background cloud mass surface densities, $\Sigma_{\rm cloud}$, which help set the initial sizes, densities, and velocity dispersions of the…
Star clusters are observed to form in a highly compact state and with low star-formation efficiencies. If the residual gas is expelled on a dynamical time the clusters disrupt thereby (i) feeding a hot kinematical stellar component into…
Nearby dwarf irregular galaxies were searched for compact star clusters using data from the HST archives. Three of the galaxies were found to host both populous clusters (M_V<-9.5 at a fiducial age of 10 Myr) and super-star clusters…
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…
The abundances of elements in stars are a critical clue to their origins. Observed star-to-star variations in logarithmic abundance within an open cluster are typically only $\sim 0.01-0.05$ over many elements, significantly smaller than…
About 20% of all massive stars in the Milky Way have unusually high velocities, the origin of which has puzzled astronomers for half a century. We argue that these velocities originate from strong gravitational interactions between single…
The current generation of millimeter interferometers have revealed a population of compact (r <~ 0.1 pc), massive (M ~ 100 Msun) gas cores that are the likely progenitors of massive stars. I review models for the evolution of these objects…
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) has recently been found to harbour more than two hundred per cent increase of its known cluster population. We provide here with solid evidence that such an unprecedented number of clusters could be largely…
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…