Related papers: Star Formation in Space and Time: Taurus-Auriga
Efforts to unveil the structure of the local interstellar medium and its recent star formation history have spanned the past seventy years. Recent studies utilizing precise data from space astrometry missions have revealed nearby, newly…
We present first results from an HST/ACS imaging survey of stars and star clusters in five nearby spiral galaxies. This contribution concentrates on NGC 1313, a highly distorted late-type barred spiral. We compare the field star and cluster…
We describe how star formation is expected to proceed in the early metal-free Universe, focusing on the very first generations of stars. We then discuss how the star formation process may change as the effects of metallicity, external…
How stars are born from clouds of gas is a rich physics problem whose solution will inform our understanding of not just stars but also planets, galaxies, and the universe itself. Star formation is stupendously inefficient. Take the Milky…
The formation of stars and planetary systems is a complex phenomenon, which relies on the interplay of multiple physical processes. Nonetheless, it represents a crucial stage for our understanding of the Universe, and in particular of the…
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…
Angular momentum plays a crucial role in the formation of stars and planets. It has long been noticed that parcels of gas in molecular clouds need to reduce their specific angular momentum by 6 to 7 orders of magnitude to participate in the…
We review recent high spatial resolution millimeter continuum and spectral line observations of (proto-)cluster regions. These observations reveal that the mass distribution of prestellar cores is consistent with the initial mass function…
Most star complexes are in fact complexes of stars, clusters and gas clouds; term "star complexes" was introduced as general one disregarding the preferential content of a complex. Generally the high rate of star formation in a complex is…
The slow rotation of some young stars and the extreme rotation periods of some Ap stars have so far defied explanation. The absence of sufficiently efficient braking mechanisms for newly formed stars points to the star formation process…
Star formation history shows a gradual decline since the last 8-9 Gyr (z=1). The bulk of present-day stellar mass and metal content was formed at redshifts lower than 2-3, which is consistent with a hierarchical scenario of galaxy…
We invoke star formation triggered by cloud-cloud collisions to explain global star formation rates of disk galaxies and circumnuclear starbursts. Previous theories based on the growth rate of gravitational perturbations ignore the…
Star formation occurs on physical scales corresponding to individual star forming regions, typically of order ~100 parsecs in size, but current observational facilities cannot resolve these scales within field galaxies beyond the local…
We present a study of the hierarchical clustering of the young stellar clusters in six local (3--15 Mpc) star-forming galaxies using Hubble Space Telescope broad band WFC3/UVIS UV and optical images from the Treasury Program LEGUS (Legacy…
Two modes of star formation are involved to explain the origin of young stars near Sgr A*. One is a disk-based mode, which explains the disk of stars orbiting Sgr A*. The other is the standard cloud-based mode observed in the Galactic disk.…
The history of star formation in the strong gravitational potential of the Galactic center has been of much interest, recently. We propose that the sub-parsec-scale disk of massive stars orbiting the massive black hole at the Galactic…
Cosmological simulations of galaxy formation appear to show a two-phase character with a rapid early phase at z>2 during which in-situ stars are formed within the galaxy from infalling cold gas followed by an extended phase since z<3 during…
Observations show that galaxies and their interstellar media are pervaded by strong magnetic fields with energies in the diffuse component being at least comparable to the thermal and even as large or larger than the turbulent energy. Such…
Recent observations have revealed a variety of young star clusters, including embedded systems, young massive clusters, and associations. We study the formation and dynamical evolution of these clusters using a combination of simulations…
Most if not all stars form in star clusters. Thus the distribution of star clusters preserves the information on the star formation history of a galaxy. Massive clusters form only during episodes of high star formation activity whereas…