{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/star-clusters-across-cosmic-time","title":"Star Clusters Across Cosmic Time","arxiv_id":"1812.01615","date":"2018-12-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mark R. Krumholz","Christopher F. McKee","Joss Bland-Hawthorn"],"abstract":"Star clusters stand at the intersection of much of modern astrophysics: the interstellar medium, gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, and cosmology. Here we review observations and theoretical models for the formation, evolution, and eventual disruption of star clusters. Current literature suggests a picture of this life cycle with several phases: (1) Clusters form in hierarchically-structured, accreting molecular clouds that convert gas into stars at a low rate per dynamical time until feedback disperses the gas. (2) The densest parts of the hierarchy resist gas removal long enough to reach high star formation efficiency, becoming dynamically-relaxed and well-mixed. These remain bound after gas removal. (3) In the first $\\sim 100$ Myr after gas removal, clusters disperse moderately fast, through a combination of mass loss and tidal shocks by dense molecular structures in the star-forming environment. (4) After $\\sim 100$ Myr, clusters lose mass via two-body relaxation and shocks by giant molecular clouds, processes that preferentially affect low-mass clusters and cause a turnover in the cluster mass function to appear on $\\sim 1-10$ Gyr timescales. (5) Even after dispersal, some clusters remain coherent and thus detectable in chemical or action space for multiple galactic orbits. In the next decade a new generation of space- and AO-assisted ground-based telescopes will enable us to test and refine this picture.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1812.01615v2","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.01615v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"star-clusters-across-cosmic-time","repo_url":"https://bitbucket.org/krumholz/cluster_review","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1812.01615","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}