Towards a Complete Understanding of Stellar Feedback in Massive Star Formation

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Anna Rosen is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the University of California, San Diego. Rosen will perform numerical simulations of how stellar feedback – the energy and momentum injected into the interstellar medium – from radiation, stellar winds, outflows, and cosmic rays affects the formation of massive stars and star clusters. Results from the study will allow astronomers to better understand the role of feedback in the processes of star formation and galaxy formation. Alongside this research, Rosen will conduct education and outreach activities centered around non-traditional and underrepresented community college students, providing research mentoring and professional development for incoming students at the University, and developing videos introducing computational astrophysics and scientific computing to community college students.Rosen will explore how various feedback mechanisms limit massive star formation on both the individual and cluster scales by performing a suite of radiation-magnetohydrodynamic simulations that follow the formation of individual massive stars within massive star clusters. Using these simulations, she will determine the initial conditions required for massive star formation and the properties of the resulting HII regions. Additionally, by including realistic dust physics and anisotropic cosmic ray diffusion into a new modeling framework, she will assess how stellar feedback limits stellar masses, controls star formation rates in molecular clouds, and potentially ejects gas over large scales. Her results will lead to better feedback models that will be used in future cosmological simulations and aid multi-wavelength observations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.