Related papers: Star Formation in the Galactic Center Environment
Understanding our Galactic Center is easier with insights from nearby galactic nuclei. Both the star formation activity in nuclear gas disks, driven by bars and nuclear bars, and the fueling of low-luminosity AGN, followed by feedback of…
The inner few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way harbours gas densities, pressures, velocity dispersions, an interstellar radiation field and a cosmic ray ionisation rate orders of magnitude higher than the disc; akin to the environment found…
This review focuses on how galaxies and their globular cluster systems form. I first discuss the now fairly convincing evidence that some globular clusters form in galaxy starbursts/mergers. One way these observations are valuable is they…
We review progress over the past decade in observations of large-scale star formation, with a focus on the interface between extragalactic and Galactic studies. Methods of measuring gas contents and star formation rates are discussed, and…
The Galactic Center is the closest galactic nucleus that can be studied with unprecedented angular resolution and sensitivity. We summarize recent basic observational results on Sagittarius A* and the conditions for star formation in the…
Giant molecular clouds (GMCs) are the sites of star formation in the Galaxy. Many of their properties can be understood in terms of a model in which the GMCs and the star-forming clumps within them are in approximate pressure equilibrium,…
Studies of molecular clouds and young stars near the sun have provided invaluable insights into the process of star formation. Indeed, much of our physical understanding of this topic has been derived from such studies. Perhaps the two most…
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,…
Recent progress in the understanding of star formation is summarized. A consistent picture is emerging where molecular clouds form with turbulent velocity fields and clumpy substructure, imprinted already during their formation. The clouds…
Our Galactic Center hosts over 10% of the known massive stars in the Galaxy. The majority of these stars are located in three particularly massive clusters that formed within the past 5 Myr. While these clusters are extraordinary, their…
How do stars manage to form within low-density, HI-dominated gas? Such environments provide a laboratory for studying star formation with physical conditions distinct from starbursts and the metal-rich disks of spiral galaxies where most…
We attempt to determine the dominant processes acting on star-forming disk galaxies as a result of the cluster environment by studying the normalised rates and radial distributions of star formation in galaxies within low-redshift clusters.…
During the last two decades, the focus of star formation research has shifted from understanding the collapse of a single dense core into a star to studying the formation hundreds to thousands of stars in molecular clouds. In this chapter,…
High-mass stars are major players in the chemical and dynamical evolution of galaxies, and young massive clusters are the natural laboratories to study their evolution and their impact on star formation processes. Only in recent years have…
It has been known for more than 30 years that star formation in giant molecular clouds (GMCs) is slow, in the sense that only ~1% of the gas forms stars every free-fall time. This result is entirely independent of any particular model of…
The observed discrete multiple stellar populations and internal abundance spreads in r- and s-process elements within globular clusters (GCs) have been suggested to be explained self-consistently by discrete star formation events over a…
We investigate how the dynamical state of molecular clouds relates to host galaxy environment, and how this impacts the star formation efficiency in the Milky Way and seven nearby galaxies. We compile measurements of molecular cloud and…
We explore the constraints on globular cluster formation provided by the observed conditions in starbursts where globulars are currently forming, and by the observed properties of young and old globular clusters. We note that the pressure…
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…
Observations of the stellar content of the Milky Way's bulge helps to understand the stellar content and evolution of distant galaxies. In this brief overview I will first highlight some recent work directed towards measuring the history of…