Talk Abstract
Thousands of stellar nurseries called molecular clouds are distributed throughout our galaxy, where dense gas is actively collapsing to form new stars. Observations of these clouds provide an exquisite view of their structures and dynamics, although they cannot reveal the larger processes that guide the assembly of molecular clouds out of diffuse gas. Young stars preserve the history of the parent molecular cloud by inheriting its properties, leaving behind a fossil record of cloud evolution that persists for tens of millions of years after formation. The Gaia spacecraft has observed nearly 2 billion stars in our galaxy, and with this treasure trove of new observations, we are now able to harness this fossil record to reveal the processes that guide local star formation, from supernovae to stellar winds to collisions between interstellar clouds, and study how these processes interact to produce the wealth of star-forming environments seen in our galaxy. In this talk, I will discuss recent advancements to the study of star formation over tens of million-year timescales and explain how those discoveries can inform the structure of the galaxy we live in, and even the environment where our solar system formed.
About the Speaker
