The (Un)certainty of Star Formation on a Cloud Scale

Sam Geen

Thursday December 5th, 14:50

In this talk I will discuss recent work to understand how random sampling of the IMF and initial turbulent velocity field affects star formation in a set of clouds similar to those found in the Milky Way. We produce 26 radiative magnetohydrodynamic (RMHD) simulations of a 10,000 Solar mass molecular cloud, and quantify to what extent random variation in these quantities affects the number of stars formed. We present a Bayesian model to determine which emergent properties of the cloud can be used to predict the SFE of the cloud, and whether star formation is truly unpredictable on a small scale or not.