If any of you got to spend your weekend outside looking up, you may have been able to make out the heart of our Milky Way and the arms of the disk spilling across the late-night sky. This region, through a simple pair of binoculars, comes alive with star clusters, and rich nebulae illuminated by star formation.

Trying to understand how massive clouds of dust and gas evolve into pockets of stars has been straightforward from a big picture perspective, and amazingly complicated when looking at the details. While computer simulations have been able to reproduce events as detailed as galaxy mergers and the evolution of the large-scale structure of our universe, we just haven’t been able to replicate the remarkable structures of nebulae and their inefficient habit of turning just 1% of their mass into stars.

Now, a new model coming from Anna Rosen and her colleagues adds in new factors that bring us just that much closer to matching reality.

Where past simulations have only considered the effects of gravity, magnetic fields, and turbulence, these new models add in the effects of the stellar jets, radiation, winds associated with young stars, and the forces of supernovae exploding in the nebula. The simulation follows the cloud’s evolution for roughly nine million years — from the initial collapse of a cloud through to the dispersal of the cloud under the forces of the young stars it built. 

This simulation is able to approximate observed star formation rates and the distribution of stellar masses seen in the sky. Researchers find it isn’t supernovae that disrupt star formation but rather the light pressure and wind pressure from young stars are enough to make star formation an inefficient process as the material to build stars is literally blasted away by the first stars to form.

This work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. While this model still isn’t sufficient to let us replicate our favorite star-forming regions, this work shows we are getting ever closer to understanding the details of star formation.

More Information

CFA press release

“The dynamics and outcome of star formation with jets, radiation, winds, and supernovae in concert,” Michael Y Grudić et al., 2022 March 2, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society