Periodic Reporting for period 3 - StarFormMapper (A Gaia and Herschel Study of the Density Distribution and Evolution of Young Massive Star Clusters)
Período documentado: 2018-09-01 hasta 2020-08-31
We achieved most of the goals of this project on completion. The most notable items related to work packages 1-4. The statistical tools developed for the first two work packages, S2D2 and INDICATE, were clearly demonstrated to have great promise for future studies of local clustering properties in very inhomogeneous distributions such as found in Gaia point source data. In addition, both extensions to existing, and new, techniques were used to derive source catalogues from Herschel maps, and different techniques found to give similar results. When combined with the Gaia data in NGC2264 these showed that the youngest sources were the most spatially compact and tightly clustered. The third work package produced a suite of state of the art hydrodynamical models of young massive star formation regions. These have all been made public, as have the tools developed for the first two work packages, for the wider use of the community.
Finally we were able to demonstrate that these tools could be combined into an online adjunct to the existing archives in the fourth work package. This provides a firm basis for future such work.
More specifically, new algorithms designed to analyse local clustering strength (INDICATE - broadly tests whether stars have more neighbours than expected from a uniform distribution), test for the presence of significant sub-groups (S2D2 - especially looking for small sub-groups of stars which may be a good guide to how they formed in the first place), and apply observational "selection functions" to the simulations which have been created, and all of these made public. A large suite of both N-body and full hydrodynamical models have been developed and also made public. In parallel with these scientific activities Quasar SR have created a complete infrastructure capable of acting as an interface between the user and the ESA archives, incorporating our algorithms along the way. The software to reproduce this is available both online as an active service at both Cardiff and Quasar, and as a download that can be installed on the end-user’s own computer.
Catalogues of stellar sub-groupings are already available for four clusters, and more are being added. A core catalogue has been created for the NGC 2264 region based on HOBYS Herschel data. Analysis of the stellar content of the same region has included the kinematical data for the first time, providing firm evidence for dynamical evolution.
Our work has continued to be published in the refereed literature, with seven papers already published, one more resubmitted after generally supportive referees comments, and a further three in the late stages of preparation. In addition, the final project conference attracted over 80 participants from around the world, and gave them the chance to see both the science being carried out by the project as well as the Quasar software environment in action in a well attended “hands-on” session.
Lastly, we feel we have reached a significant public audience for our work, and would like to highlight in particular the work relating to holograms by both Leeds and Quasar, as well as Quasar’s development for SFM science of their virtual reality system.