Speaker: Sarah Loebman (University of California, Merced)
Star Clusters on FIRE: Resolving Clustered Star Formation in Cosmological Simulations
Hydrodynamic simulations offer a way to connect the dots from the earliest stages of giant molecular cloud (GMC) assembly through clustered star formation to the present day location of dispersed stars. I will present first results identifying clustered star formation in the Latte simulations: cosmological Milky Way-mass FIRE-2 disk galaxies simulated with gas with 1 pc scale spatial resolution. Latte generates realistic young massive star clusters, with size, velocity and metallicity dispersions matching those in the Milky Way. I will discuss how star cluster properties vary in Latte as a function of environment and time. I will also discuss the relative distribution of star clusters and GMCs across the Latte disks. Finally, I will highlight an exciting new result: young massive star clusters identified while still associated within their natal GMCs. Tracing these star clusters and their host GMCs forward in time reveals star formation is short-lived, ceasing before the onset of supernovae feedback at ~3 Myr.
