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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 formation of supermassive stars is believed to be an essential intermediate step for the formation of the massive black hole seeds that become the supermassive black holes powering the quasars observed in the early Universe. Numerical…
A significant fraction of Milky Way (MW) satellites exhibit phase-space properties consistent with a coherent orbital plane. Using tailored N--body simulations of a spherical MW halo that recently captured a massive (1.8$\times…
Describing how the properties of the interstellar medium combine across size-scales is crucial for understanding star formation scaling laws and connecting Galactic and extragalactic data of molecular clouds. We describe how the statistical…
In a LCDM cosmology, the Milky Way accretes satellites into the stellar disc. We use cosmological simulations to assess the frequency of near disc plane and higher inclination accretion events, and collisionless simulations of satellite…
Galaxy interactions can disturb gas in galactic discs, compress it, excite it, and enhance star formation. An intriguing system likely consisting of two interacting galaxies overlapping on the line-of-sight was previously studied through…
We propose and investigate a new formation mechanism for globular clusters in which they form within molecular clouds that are formed in the shocked regions created by galactic winds driven by successive supernova explosions shortly after…
Star formation is slow, in the sense that the gas consumption time is much longer than the dynamical time. It is also inefficient; essentially all star formation in local galaxies takes place in giant molecular clouds (GMCs), but the…
A large fraction of the gas in the Galaxy is cold, dense, and molecular. If all this gas collapsed under the influence of gravity and formed stars in a local free-fall time, the star formation rate in the Galaxy would exceed that observed…
Although fundamental for astrophysics, the processes that produce massive stars are not well understood. Large distances, high extinction, and short timescales of critical evolutionary phases make observations of these processes…
A strong correlation between atmospheric pressure and molecular gas mass is found in central cluster galaxies and early-type galaxies. This trend and a similar trend with atmospheric gas density would naturally arise if the molecular clouds…
Young massive stars or clusters are often observed at the peripheries of HII regions. What triggers star formation at such locations? Among the scenarios that have been proposed, the `collect and collapse' process is particularly attractive…
Massive stars blow powerful winds and eventually explode as supernovae. By doing so, they inject energy and momentum in the circumstellar medium, which is pushed away from the star and piles up to form a dense and expanding shell of gas.…
In this contribution we review our recent numerical work discussing the essential role of the local cluster environment in assembling massive stars. First we show that massive stars are formed from low mass pre-stellar cores and become…
The Galactic centre (GC) is a crowded environment: observations have revealed the presence of (molecular, atomic and ionized) gas, of a cusp of late-type stars, and of ~100 early-type stars, about half of which lying in one or possibly two…
The mm-wave continuum sources (MCS) in Ophiuchus have mutual collision rates less than their collapse rates by a factor of 10 to 100, suggesting most will form stars without further interactions. However, this ratio of rates would have…
The recent identification of one or two sub-parsec disks of young, massive stars orbiting the ~4e6 solar mass black hole Sgr A* has prompted an "in-situ" scenario for star formation in disks of gas formed from a cloud captured from the…
The observed star formation rate of the Milky Way can be explained by applying a metallicity-dependent factor to convert CO luminosity to molecular gas mass and a star formation efficiency per free-fall time that depends on the virial…
In Meidt et al. (2018), we showed that gas kinematics on the scale of individual molecular clouds are not dominated by self-gravity but also track a component that originates with orbital motion in the potential of the host galaxy. This…
Complete catalogs of molecular clouds in the Milky Way allow analysis of the molecular medium and the star formation properties of the Milky Way that closely follows the method used for nearby galaxies. We explore whether the big dip in the…