Related papers: Can massive stars form in low mass clouds?
Cloud environment is thought to play a critical role in determining the mechanism of formation of massive stars. In this contribution we review the physical characteristics of the environment around recently formed massive stars. Particular…
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 aim of this work is to test to what extent the star cluster population of a galaxy can be utilised to constrain or estimate the star formation history, with the Large Magellanic Cloud as our testbed. We follow two methods to extract…
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…
Massive stars (> 8 $M_\odot$) are known to have high degrees of multiplicity, e.g., with about 60% in triples or higher-order multiples. Such high levels of multiplicity may arise during formation (primary multiplicity) or through dynamical…
The stellar initial mass functions (IMFs) for the Galactic bulge, the Milky Way, other galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and the integrated stars in the Universe are composites from countless individual IMFs in star clusters and associations…
We simulate the formation and evolution of young star clusters using the combination of SPH simulations and direct N-body simulations. We start by performing SPH simulations of the giant molecular cloud with a turbulent velocity field, a…
Close encounters between stars in star forming regions are important as they can perturb or destroy protoplanetary discs, young planetary systems, and stellar multiple systems. We simulate simple, viralised, equal-mass $N$-body star…
Star clusters stand at the intersection of much of modern astrophysics: the interstellar medium, gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, and cosmology. Here we review observations and theoretical models for the formation, evolution, and…
There are at least 2 distinct mechanisms for the formation of young massive clusters (YMC), all of which require galactic-scale processes. One operates in harrassed fragile galaxies, in the dense cores of low mass galaxies, at the ends of…
We summarize some of the results obtained from Herschel surveys of the nearby star forming regions and the Galactic plane. We show that in the nearby star forming regions the starless core spatial surface density distribution is very…
The relation between the maximum stellar mass in a very young cluster (mmax) and the total stellar mass of the cluster (Mecl), known as the mmax-Mecl relation, remains debated in the literature. To test the validity of this relation, we…
We test the hypothesis that globular clusters form in supergiant molecular clouds within high-redshift galaxies. Numerical simulations demonstrate that such large, dense, and cold gas clouds assemble naturally in current hierarchical models…
The study of the very young open cluster NGC 6231 clearly shows the presence of a mass segregation for the most massive stars. These observations, combined with those concerning other young objects and very recent numerical simulations,…
We present the results of SPH simulations in which two clouds, each having mass $M_{_{\rm{o}}}\!=\!500\,{\rm M}_{_\odot}$ and radius $R_{_{\rm{o}}}\!=\!2\,{\rm pc}$, collide head-on at relative velocities of $\Delta v_{_{\rm{o}}}…
Using our Binary Population And Spectral Synthesis (BPASS) code we explore the effects on star-formation rate indicators of stochastically sampling the stellar initial mass function, adding a cluster mass dependent stellar upper-mass limit…
Recent observations have demonstrated a significant growth in the integrated stellar mass of the red sequence since z=1, dominated by a steadily increasing number of galaxies with stellar masses M* < 10^11 M_sun. In this paper, we use the…
Most simulations of galaxies and massive giant molecular clouds (GMCs) cannot explicitly resolve the formation (or predict the main-sequence masses) of individual stars. So they must use some prescription for the amount of feedback from an…
Star formation has often been studied by separating the low- and high-mass regimes with an approximate boundary at 8M_sun. While some of the outcomes of the star-formation process are different between the two regimes, it is less clear…
The presence or absence of star clusters in galaxies, and the properties of star cluster populations compared to their host galaxy properties, are important observables for validating models of cluster formation, galaxy formation, and…