Feedback-driven outflows, from star-forming clouds to star-forming galaxies

Star formation "feedback" takes many forms, with the common feature that energy created by young stars is returned to the interstellar environment from which they were born, and that this strongly affects evolution of the surrounding gas on a range of scales.  Radiation feedback (both ionizing and non-ionizing) from OB stars is believed to be important to the dispersal of giant molecular clouds; expanding supernova remnants are believed to create the hot ISM and drive the turbulence in the diffuse warm/cold ISM; and galactic winds are believed to be powered by some combination of these processes plus cosmic rays streaming out of galaxies.  In this talk, I will highlight key aspects of the physics of each feedback process, and present results from numerical MHD and RHD simulations that resolve the detailed dynamical interactions involved.

Speaker: Eve Ostriker, Princeton