The 0.1 to 10 pc Scale Structure of Star Formation in the Solar Neighborhood

Systematic surveys of molecular clouds in the solar neighborhood with the Spitzer Space Telescope have uncovered thousands of actively forming Sun-like stars.  Their young age and sheer numbers have yielded the means for the development of a new set of observational constraints on how stellar mass is assembled from the diffuse interstellar medium. I will present a review of these surveys and recent work to characterize the structure of the stellar distributions and their relationship to the observed distribution of natal gas.  These results offer a tantalizing new interpretive framework for identifying primordial star-forming sites at small scales and may facilitate better understanding of the source physics behind large-scale emergent phenomena related to star-formation in other galaxies (the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation).

http://www.astro.umass.edu/~rguter/Rob_Gutermuth_Astronomy/Welcome.html