Related papers: Star-Forming Complexes in Galaxies
The strongest starbursts are observed towards galaxy nuclei, or circumnuclear regions. However in interacting galaxies, star formation is also triggered in overlap regions far from nuclei, in spiral arms and sometimes in tidal tails. What…
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 consider the formation of OB associations from two perspectives: (a) the fractional gas consumption in star formation,epsilon, per dynamical time scale t_dyn in a galaxy, and (b) the origin of the so-called Kennicutt-Schmidt law that the…
Galactic nuclei often harbor a disproportionately large amount of star formation activity with respect to their surrounding disks. Not coincidentally, the density of molecular material in galactic nuclei is often also much greater than that…
During the last two decades, the focus of star formation research has shifted from understanding the collapse of a single dense core into a star to studying the formation hundreds to thousands of stars in molecular clouds. In this chapter,…
The formation of massive stellar clusters in turbulent molecular clouds is investigated. We include artificial star formation and energy feedback of newly born stars. The obtained systems are not likely to survive. Case studies to determine…
Stars form in dense, clustered environments, where feedback from newly formed stars eventually ejects the gas, terminating star formation and leaving behind one or more star clusters. Using the STARFORGE simulations, it is possible to…
We present simulations of the formation and evolution of clusters in spiral arms. The simulations follow two different spiral arm regions, and the total gas mass is varied to produce a range of different mass clusters. We find that…
Star formation is intimately linked to the dynamical evolution of molecular clouds. Turbulent fragmentation determines where and when protostellar cores form, and how they contract and grow in mass via accretion from the surrounding cloud…
The formation of massive stars in close binary systems is complicated due to their high radiation pressure, the crowded environment and the expected minimum separation for fragmentation being many times greater than the orbital separation.…
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…
Observations of globular clusters show that they have universal lognormal mass functions with a characteristic peak at $\sim 2\times 10^{5}\, {\rm{M_{\odot}}}$, but the origin of this peaked distribution is highly debated. Here we…
Stars form from molecular gas under complex conditions influenced by multiple competing physical mechanisms, such as gravity, turbulence, and magnetic fields. However, accurately identifying the fraction of gas actively involved in star…
We investigate the physical processes which lead to the formation of massive stars. Using a numerical simulation of the formation of a stellar cluster from a turbulent molecular cloud, we evaluate the relevant contributions of fragmentation…
Most stars are born in rich young stellar clusters (YSCs) embedded in giant molecular clouds. The most massive stars live out their short lives there, profoundly influencing their natal environments by ionizing HII regions, inflating…
Clusters of galaxies are self-gravitating systems of mass ~10^14-10^15 Msun. They consist of dark matter (~80 %), hot diffuse intracluster plasma (< 20 %) and a small fraction of stars, dust, and cold gas, mostly locked in galaxies. In most…
Understanding the star formation process is central to much of modern astrophysics. For several decades it has been thought that stellar birth is primarily controlled by the interplay between gravity and magnetostatic support, modulated by…
Analyzing global starburst properties in various kinds of starburst and post-starburst galaxies and relating them to the properties of the star cluster populations they form, I explore the conditions for the formation of massive, compact,…
The discovery of young globular clusters in merging galaxies and other environments provides an opportunity to study directly the process of globular cluster formation. Empirically it appears that globular cluster formation occurs…
The inner few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way harbours gas densities, pressures, velocity dispersions, an interstellar radiation field and a cosmic ray ionisation rate orders of magnitude higher than the disc; akin to the environment found…