Galactic stories told by their stars
Abstract
Being both a former and new member of the Observatory family, I will start this seminar with a brief introduction about myself, my career path, and how my hobbies put me too often in near-death situations. I will then switch to the connection between galaxies and their stars.
Observations and simulations of the last decade have unambiguously established the role of galactic scales in triggering and regulating star and star cluster formation. The accretion of matter and momentum from cosmological scales, the injection of turbulence in the ISM at kpc-scales, and disk instabilities are the key ingredients of the influence of the galactic physics on the smaller scales. But the details of this complex interplay remain to be understood. How does this picture translate in different galactic environments, in violent mergers and at high redshift? What makes the difference between the formation of stars, and that of a dense star cluster? In this talk, I will present a decade-long effort exploring the multi-scale and multi-physics aspects of galaxy and star (cluster) formation. I will use a collection of high resolution simulations to illustrate the diversity of the star formation process, and the different regimes of star and galaxy evolution, and their possible observable signatures, across cosmic time. And I will (try to) do all this in 45 minutes…