Related papers: The Birth, Evolution and Death of Star Clusters
Massive stars in young massive clusters insert tremendous amounts of mass and energy into their surroundings in the form of stellar winds and supernova ejecta. Mutual shock-shock collisions lead to formation of hot gas, filling the volume…
Nuclear star clusters are among the densest stellar systems known and are common in both early- and late-type galaxies. They exhibit scaling relations with their host galaxy which may be related to those of supermassive black holes. These…
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…
Massive stars form in clusters within self-gravitating molecular clouds. The size scale of these clusters is sufficiently large that non-thermal, or turbulent, motions of the gas must be taken into account when considering their formation.…
We explore, through a simplified, semi-analytic model, the formation of dense clusters containing massive stars. The parent cloud spawning the cluster is represented as an isothermal sphere. This sphere is in near force balance between…
Dense star clusters expand until their sizes are limited by the tidal field of their host galaxy. During this expansion phase the member stars evolve and lose mass. We show that for clusters with short initial relaxation time scales (<~100…
We study the evolution of populations of binary stars within massive cluster-forming regions. We simulate the formation of young massive star clusters within giant molecular clouds with masses ranging from 2 x 10$^{4}$ to 3.2 x 10$^{5}$…
This chapter reviews the dynamical processes in young stellar clusters. The accretion of gas by individual stars affects the dynamics of the cluster, and the masses of the stars. Dynamical mass segregation cannot explain the degree of mass…
The concept that stars form in the modern era began some 60 years ago with the key observation of expanding OB associations. Now we see that these associations are an intermediate scale in a cascade of hierarchical structures that begins on…
Star formation occurs in hierarchical patterns in both space and time. Galaxies form large regions on the scale of the interstellar Jeans length and these large regions apparently fragment into giant molecular clouds and cloud cores in a…
Observations of the dust and gas around embedded stellar clusters reveal some of the processes involved in their formation and evolution. Large scale mass infall with rates dM/dt=4e-4 solar masses/year is found to be disrupted on small…
Stars do not generally form in isolation. Instead, they form in clusters, and in these clustered environments newborn stars can have profound effects on one another and on their parent gas clouds. Feedback from clustered stars is almost…
(shortened) Direct N-body calculations are presented of the formation of Galactic clusters using GasEx, which is a variant of the code Nbody6. The calculations focus on the possible evolution of the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC) by assuming…
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…
Most stars form as part of a star cluster. The most massive clusters in the Milky Way exist in two groups - loose and compact clusters - with significantly different sizes at the end of the star formation process. After their formation both…
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…
I discuss two questions about the origin of star clusters: How long does the process take? What is the mode of individual star formation? I argue that observations of Galactic star-forming regions, particularly the Orion Nebula Cluster…
Most stars form in highly clustered environments within molecular clouds, but eventually disperse into the distributed stellar field population. Exactly how the stellar distribution evolves from the embedded stage into gas-free associations…
The formation of stellar clusters dictates the pace at which galaxies evolve, and solving the question of their formation will undoubtedly lead to a better understanding of the Universe as a whole. While it is well known that star clusters…
Most stars form in dense star clusters deeply embedded in residual gas. These objects must therefore be seen as the fundamental building blocks of galaxies. With this contribution some physical processes that act in the very early and also…