event
Friday 03 Mar 2023: Structures of Star Clusters & Fingerprints of Formation Mechanisms
Rebecka Arnold - Keele University
Physics building, 4th floor 14:00-15:00
Much remains unknown about how stars and star clusters form. Efforts to study their formation are frustrated by the fact that star-forming regions evolve dynamically on very rapid timescales, meaning even relatively young regions have typically undergone significant processing. It is left to us to try to find fingerprints of their initial conditions in this later-life data, and from that reconstruct their formation conditions. By improving our understanding of star-forming region's initial conditions, we can make inferences about the process of star formation.
I present our theoretical study on the application of the Moran's I statistic to quantifying spatial-kinematic substructure in star forming regions. I will show how it, in combination with N-body simulations, can be used to infer the initial conditions of these regions. We then apply this statistic to observational data of real star forming regions. I will describe our findings, what this tells about the initial conditions of these regions, and what we can infer about star formation in general.
