event
Wednesday 14 Jan 2009: Peering into the cradle of Galactic Superpowers: homing in on the physics of massive star formation
Dr Steve Longmore - Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
Physics, 4th Floor interaction area 12:00-13:00
Massive stars dominate their environment wherever they are found. These Galactic superpowers thus play a pivotal role in shaping the observable universe. However, much of the physics governing their formation process remains poorly understood. Observationally, progress has been hampered by the difficulty in isolating large numbers of sources, particularly at the earliest evolutionary stages where the initial conditions are imprinted. In this talk I will first present an observational survey I undertook as part of my PhD to try and address this problem by finding and characterising the physical properties (and hence relative evolutionary ages) of a sample of young massive star formation regions. Building upon this work, I will then present recent results from observations with the Submillimeter Array (SMA) to investigate the fragmentation of molecular gas in six very young, massive protoclusters. Intriguingly in this small sample the observed distribution of molecular gas as a function of time appears to favour the predictions of one of the two main competing theories of massive star formation.
