2025-05-28 –, Main Conference Room
Although substantial progress has been made in our understanding of star formation, the impacts of environment is still of great debate. The intricate interplay of infall, outflows, stellar winds etc. could strongly affect the final outcomes of the star formation processes. In particular, does the environment have an impact on the Initial Mass Function, the binary fraction produced, and the evolution of circumstellar disks? The answers have profound implications for our understanding of planet formation, the mass to light ratios of stellar populations, and the dynamics of star clusters.
To push the studies to more extreme (and more distant) regions than the typical low-mass star forming regions near the sun, sensitivity and spatial resolution is paramount to resolve the cluster content to low mass.
Here we present observations of young massive clusters in the Milky way and the Large Magellanic Cloud using a combination of adaptive optics ground-based observations, HST, and JWST observations. Covering a range in cluster mass of over 10 and a factor of over three in metallicity, we have derived mass functions and disk fractions, reaching well into the brown dwarf regime within the Galaxy. We discuss the IMF as a function of cluster metallicity, the disk fraction as a function of metallicity, cluster mass, and age and show the effects of environment through comparison with nearby regions.
