Related papers: How star clusters could survive low star formation…
Star clusters are often used as tracers of major star formation events in external galaxies as they can be studied up to much larger distances than individual stars. It is vital to understand their evolution if they are used to derive, for…
We review progress in numerical simulations of star cluster formation. These simulations involve the bottom-up assembly of clusters through hierarchical mergers, which produces a fractal stellar distribution at young (~0.5 Myr) ages. The…
We investigate the dynamical effects of rapid gas expulsion from the core of a young stellar cluster. The aims of this study are to determine 1) whether a mass-segregated core survives the gas expulsion and 2) the probable location of any…
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.…
Clusters that form in total 10^3 < N < 10^5 stars (type II clusters) lose their gas within a dynamical time as a result of the photo-ionising flux from O stars. Sparser (type I) clusters get rid of their residual gas on a timescale longer…
Two puzzles associated with open clusters have attracted a lot of attention -- their formation, with densities and velocity dispersions that are not too different from those of the star forming regions in the Galaxy, given that the observed…
Two main mechanisms have classically been proposed for the formation of runaway stars. In the binary supernova scenario (BSS), a massive star in a binary explodes as a supernova, ejecting its companion. In the dynamical ejection scenario, a…
Mergers of massive gas-rich galaxies trigger violent starbursts that - over timescales of $> 100$ Myr and regions $> 10$ kpc - form massive and compact star clusters comparable in mass and radii to Galactic globular clusters. The star…
Observations and theory both suggest that star clusters form sub-virial (cool) with highly sub-structured distributions. We perform a large ensemble of N-body simulations of moderate-sized (N=1000) cool, fractal clusters to investigate…
Studies of evolved massive stars indicate that they form in a clustered mode. During the earliest evolutionary stages, these regions are embedded within their natal cores. Here, we show high-spatial-resolution interferometric dust continuum…
In this review, I present the case for how massive stars may form through stellar collisions. This mechanism requires very high stellar densities, up to 4 orders of magnitude higher than are observed in the cores of dense young clusters. In…
Feedback from massive stars plays an important role in the formation of star clusters. Whether a very massive star is born early or late in the cluster formation timeline has profound implications for the star cluster formation and assembly…
The currently available empirical evidence on the star formation processes in the extreme, high-pressure environments induced by galaxy encounters, mostly based on high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope imaging observations, strongly…
The evolution of star clusters is studied using N-body simulations in which the evolution of single stars and binaries are taken self-consistently into account. Initial conditions are chosen to represent relatively young Galactic open…
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…
How stellar clusters disrupt, and over what timescales, is intimately linked with how they form. Here, we review the theory and observations of cluster disruption, both the suggested initial rapid dissolution phase (infant mortality) and…
We investigate the formation of protostellar clusters during the collapse of dense molecular cloud cores with a focus on the evolution of potential and kinetic energy, the degree of substructure, and the early phase of mass segregation. Our…
We study the evolution of star clusters in the Galactic tidal field starting from their birth in molecular clumps. Our model clusters form according to the local-density-driven cluster formation model in which the stellar density profile is…
The numerous and massive young star clusters in blue compact galaxies (BCGs) are used to investigate the properties of their hosts. We test whether BCGs follow claimed relations between cluster populations and their hosts, such as the the…
We report the formation of bound star clusters in a sample of high-resolution cosmological zoom-in simulations of z>5 galaxies from the FIRE project. We find that bound clusters preferentially form in high-pressure clouds with gas surface…