Thursday

Understanding the evolution of molecular clouds is crucial to discern the star formation process. Feedback from massive stars changes the morphology and physical properties of the clouds affecting the creation of a new generation of stars. Moreover, molecular clouds are not isolated entities, on the contrary, they are dynamical aggregates of gas which continuously change within their galactic environment.

In a previous work (Rey-Raposo+2015) we explore the possibility of extracting clouds from full-scale galactic simulations and re-simulate at sub parsec scale. Following this study, we included feedback from winds and supernovae (SNe) to those galactic clouds (Rey-Raposo+2017), finding in both cases that the inherited properties from the galaxy are crucial to understand the star formation history of a given cloud.

We have modified the AMR code RAMSES, including a new method for sampling the Initial Mass Function (IMF) on-the-fly while creating star particles in our galactic clouds. As our mass resolution is now of the order ~0.1- 0.5 Msun, we consider stellar feedback from winds and SNe from individual stars. At this resolution we trace the evolution of the natal cloud as well as the clusters of stars formed within it. We no longer have a clump of stars representing a full (or partial) stellar population. Stars are able to evolve individually, and only around massive stars there will be winds and SNe feedback.