Overview

Massive star formation requires extreme temperatures, densities, shocks, and turbulent conditions. Such conditions are often found in super star clusters which are defined by their high luminosities (over 2,000,000 solar luminosity), compact sizes of a few parsecs, young ages (less than 100,000 years), and contain hundreds of very massive stars greater than 8 solar masses. I am interested in using archival observations as well as proposing for my own observations on ground-based (ALMA, Magellan, Gemini South) and space-based (Herschel, Spitzer, Hubble, SOFIA, JWST) instruments to study the birthplace of extremely massive stars.

The instruments on JWST will have angular resolutions 10 times better than Spitzer and sensitivities over a hundred times better than current instruments. This figure shows the vast improvement between Spitzer 8 micron observations (left) and JWST MIRI F770W observations (right). We are able to study star formation at sub-parsec (0.05 parsec) scales in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

JWST NIRCam observations of the N79 region of the Large Magellanic Cloud reveal H72.97-69.39 to indeed be a super star cluster with over 1500 protostars in its vicinity. The super star cluster is less than 100000 years old, the youngest of its kind in our local Universe. MIRI MRS spectroscopic imaging has revealed the youngest and most embedded individual young stellar objects with ice and silicate features. High resolution interferometric, photometric, and spectroscopic data will be key to determining the formation process of super star clusters and the effect of the massive O stars on local- and galaxy-wide scales. I aim to study super star cluster H72.97-69.39 as a proxy for how some of the most massive stars and super star clusters formed at the peak epoch of star formation in the Universe (z ~ 2).