The "ecosystem" of the star-forming complex N66 in the Small Magellanic Cloud

Séminaire IPAG de Dimitrios Gouliermis (MPIA), jeudi 12 mars 2015 à 11h00, IPAG seminar room

Stars are born in groups of various shapes, sizes and degree of "boundness". Different types of stellar systems, from compact dense clusters to extended stellar associations, are not however independent to each other, but manifestations of the same hierarchy in the star formation process. This is supported from observations of resolved star-forming regions, where compact stellar clusters seem to represent the centers of recent star formation within larger loose stellar structures of older or comparable ages. Typical star-forming complexes in the Magellanic Clouds, observed with the Hubble Space Telescope, allow the study of the complete stellar sampling across length-scales of typical molecular clouds. I will discuss the spatial distribution of newly-born stars, the correlation between surface density of young stars and dust surface density, as well as star formation rates derived from star-counts, across the star-forming complex N66 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. We interpret our observations in terms of stellar clustering at birth, its hierarchical behavior, and its relation to the ISM morphology in an attempt to disentangle the star formation conditions between clustered and non-clustered star formation.