Related papers: How do bound star clusters form?
[abridged] Unbound young stellar systems, the loose ensembles of physically related young bright stars, trace the typical regions of recent star formation in galaxies. Their morphologies vary from small associations of stars to enormous…
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…
Most stars, perhaps even all stars, form in crowded stellar environments. Such star forming regions typically dissolve within ten million years, while others remain bound as stellar groupings for hundreds of millions to billions of years,…
Sub-virial gravitational collapse is one mechanism by which star clusters may form. Here we investigate whether this mechanism can be inferred from observations of young clusters. To address this question, we have computed SPH simulations…
We examine the origin of clustercentric gradients in the star formation rates and colors of rich cluster galaxies within the context of a simple model where clusters are built through the ongoing accretion of field galaxies. The model…
Young galaxies are clumpy, gas-rich, and highly turbulent. Star formation appears to occur by gravitational instabilities in galactic disks. The high dispersion makes the clumps massive and the disks thick. The star formation rate should be…
This paper argues that star forming environments should be classified into finer divisions than the traditional isolated and clustered modes. Using the observed set of galactic open clusters and theoretical considerations regarding cluster…
The properties of young star clusters formed within a galaxy are thought to vary in different interstellar medium (ISM) conditions, but the details of this mapping from galactic to cluster scales are poorly understood due to the large…
Recent surveys of star forming regions have shown that most stars, and probably all massive stars, are born in dense stellar clusters. The mechanism by which a molecular cloud fragments to form several hundred to thousands of individual…
Globular clusters host complex stellar populations whose chemical signatures suggest early (3 Myr - 1 Gyr) retention and reprocessing of stellar ejecta, yet direct evidence for intracluster gas is lacking. Here we present a unified…
The existence of older stars within a young star cluster can be interpreted to imply that star formation occurs on time scales longer than a free-fall time of a pre-cluster cloud core. Here the idea is explored that these older stars are…
Mass segregation is seen in many star clusters, but whether massive stars form in the center of a cluster or migrate there dynamically is still debated. N-body simulations have shown that early dynamical mass segregation is possible when…
Giant molecular clouds (GMCs) are the primary reservoirs of cold, star-forming molecular gas in the Milky Way and similar galaxies, and thus any understanding of star formation must encompass a model for GMC formation, evolution, and…
Stellar clusters are born in cold and dusty molecular clouds and the youngest clusters are embedded to various degrees in dusty dark molecular material. Such embedded clusters can be considered protocluster systems. The most deeply buried…
We perform $N$-body simulations of star clusters in time-dependant galactic potentials. Since the Milky Way was built-up through mergers with dwarf galaxies, its globular cluster population is made up of clusters formed both during the…
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…
The most recent observational evidence seems to indicate that giant molecular clouds are predominantly gravitationally unbound objects. In this paper we show that this is a natural consequence of a scenario in which cloud-cloud collisions…
We investigate the evolution, following gas dispersal, of a star cluster produced from a hydrodynamical calculation. We find that when the gas, initially comprising 60% of the mass, is removed, the system settles into a bound cluster…
After the stars of a new, embedded star cluster have formed they blow the remaining gas out of the cluster. Especially winds of massive stars and definitely the on-set of the first supernovae can remove the residual gas from a cluster. This…
Stars form from cold molecular interstellar gas. Since this is relatively rare in the local Universe, galaxies like the Milky Way form only a few new stars per year. Typical massive galaxies in the distant Universe formed stars an order of…