Recipe for star clusters
forces create dense filaments that funnel gas into what ultimately become super-bright clusters of stars that can merge with other clusters to form vast globular clusters.
Pudritz said, “Most stars in let it run using resources that included Scinet, Canada’s largest supercomputer center.
After a month, the program turned out star clusters identical to those known to exist, showing that the researchers had managed reverse-engineer the conditions in the distant universe.”
Many had previously argued that clusters of different sizes and ages had formed differently, the authors said, but the new research shows they all form the same way.
The simulations show that the outcome depends on the initial reservoir of gas that will, after turbulence, gravity and feedback have done their work, create clusters of stars of various sizes over the course of a few million years.
Harris said, “This is the first convincing route to modelling the formation of star clusters.
“It applies across all mass scales — little clusters and big ones — and it should work at any particular time in the universe’s history, in any particular galaxy.”
Such simulations would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago, the authors said.
They said, “The success of this project suggested that similar research on other complex problems, such as the formation of entire galaxies down to the births of specific individual stars, could soon be within reach.”