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| EPoS Contribution |
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Star formation in giant complexes: The Cat's Paw Nebula
Joana Ascenso ESO, Garching, Germany | |
| The formation of stars from molecular clouds is rapid and simultaneous to within a few million years throughout the cloud. How does the entire giant cloud "know" when to form stars? What triggers this coordinated star formation on such large scales? And is the resulting mass distribution a global property of the cloud, determined prior to star formation, or is it a characteristic of each individual star formation event? What is the IMF of the whole cloud? In this talk I will present preliminary results of the near-infrared study of a young, massive star forming complex, NGC 6334 - the Cat's Paw Nebula. This complex sits in a giant filament 20 pc across and contains a myriad of pockets of star formation, all in similar stages of star formation to within ~5 Myr, making it the perfect object to answer these questions. | |
| Collaborators: J. Alves, Univ. Vienna, Austria S. Wolk, CfA, USA J. Rathborne, CSIRO, Australia O. Gonzalez, ESO, Germany |
Key publication
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