On June 2019, the panel for the evaluation of the proposals for observations with the NASA telescope Chandra, operating in the X-rays, which met up in Boston, has approved the Large Project: “Star formation in starburst: a deep ACIS-I observation of Westerlund 1“, led by the astronomer Mario Giuseppe Guarcello – INAF Astronomical Observatory of Palermo. More details on the
Despite the stars in our Galaxy typically formed in stellar clusters, only a small fraction of them today is observed associated with a cluster. This led to the conclusion that stellar clusters typically disperse in 10-100 million years. Two mechanisms are thought to be responsible for the dispersion of stellar clusters. According to the model of the “residual gas expulsion”,
The star formation process starts with the gravitational collapse of large and cold clouds of gas and dust. Despite it sounds like a simple process, it is actually very complicated and we still lack full comprehension of the details of how these clouds can form clusters and associations of young stars. This is one of the main objectives of
