Efforts to unveil the structure of the local interstellar medium and its recent star-formation history have spanned the past 70 years (refs. 1–6). Recent studies using precise data from space astrometry missions have revealed nearby, newly formed star clusters with connected origins7–12. Nonetheless, mapping young clusters across the entire sky back to their natal regions has been hindered by a lack of clusters with precise radial-velocity data. Here we show that 155 out of 272 (57%) high-quality young clusters13,14 within 1 kiloparsec of the Sun arise from three distinct spatial volumes. This conclusion is based on the analysis of data from the third Gaia release15 and other large-scale spectroscopic surveys. At present, dispersed throughout the solar neighbourhood, their past positions more than 30 million years ago reveal that these families of clusters each formed in one of three compact, massive star-forming complexes. One of these fami
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Galaxies in the Universe are distributed in a web-like structure characterized by different large-scale environments: dense clusters, elongated filaments, sheetlike walls and under-dense regions, called voids1–5. The low density in voids is expected to affect the properties of their galaxies. Indeed, previous studies6–14 have shown that galaxies in voids are, on average, bluer and less massive, and have later morphologies and higher current star formation rates than galaxies in denser large-scale environments. However, it has never been observationally proved that the star formation histories (SFHs) in voids are substantially different from those in filaments, walls and clusters. Here we show that void galaxies have had, on average, slower SFHs than galaxies in denser large-scale environments. We also find two main SFH types present in all the environments: ‘short-timescale’ galaxies are not affected by their large-scale environment at
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Renowned scholar Juna Kollmeier named director of U of T’s Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics Juna Kollmeier, who will become the new director of CITA on July 1, is an observationally oriented astrophysicist whose research focuses on supermassive black holes, the Milky Way and the intergalactic medium (photo by Bret Harman/TED)
Renowned astrophysicist
Juna Kollmeier, on faculty at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, has been named the new director of the University of Toronto’s Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), a research centre focused on the origin and evolution of the universe and other phenomena discovered by modern astronomy.