Despite having been studied for decades, if not centuries, the very process of star formation itself is still poorly understood. One of the main impediments to achieve a fuller understanding of this fundamental and important process is the scale of the problem; a very broad range in expertise is required, far surpassing that often available through smaller collaborative efforts. This workshop has the potential of offering precisely that: the researchers joining expertise have been pioneers and are world-leading experts in fields ranging from the detailed physics governing the structure and evolution of stars, via that of star-forming regions, to galaxy-wide starbursts, and their interplay with the ISM through feedback on a variety of scales, from single stars to entire galaxies.
Originality and timeliness of the modeling effort.
Models describing the evolution of intermediate to high mass stars and of the
atmospheres of hot stars have seen major and significant improvements in
recent years. Workshop participants were among the pioneers and are world
leaders in this field; they are credited with the most important achievements,
because of their painstaking implementation of numerous left-over but crucial
physical processes (such as the effects of rotation, gravity waves, and -
very recently - of magnetic fields), and through the development of new
numerical methods combined with the increased computing power available
today.
Galaxies actively forming large numbers of massive stars do so in extremely dense areas. This implies, therefore, that we must carefully follow the radiation transfer through the surrounding ISM. Until recently this problem has been treated only in a fragmented way: photo-ionisation and photo-destruction codes have been developed independently from continuum radiation transfer codes for dust. Yet we know that dust can be mixed with gas even in high-energy environments where it can strongly affect the thermodynamics of the gas. Models that try to couple gas and dust are emerging, pioneered by proposed workshop participants. However, it will still be a major challenge to push these models towards a consistent treatment of the actual properties of gas and dust. We can face this challenge, by bringing together experts in the fields of gas and dust modelling, and by planning the observational testbench with which to validate the codes.
Our newly developed chemo-dynamical models will allow up-to-date 3D simulations of multiple SN interactions in inhomogeneous media. This will provide crucial and fundamental clues as to the SN efficiency in heating and polluting the ISM. Theoretical and observational studies of the feedback from massive stars as a function of environment (and metallicity) will provide highly relevant and timely developments relevant to the analysis of current XMM and Chandra X-ray observations. We are now at the verge of being able to study in detail the chemical composition and energetics of galactic winds as a function of galaxy type and (gaseous) environment. For the study of galaxies beyond the Local Group, these models will be combined with our spectrophotometric tools to derive their evolutionary parameters and SF histories. However, the advent of large observational data sets requires the use of fast computational algorithms for statistical analyses.
The stellar models and yields will be disseminated rapidly and implemented in the open-source Legacy Tool. Its development will require the solution of several open problems in computer science, including the development of efficient algorithms for indexing data with continuous attributes, machine-learning techniques to speed up model-fitting algorithms, and data-mining algorithms to deal with distributed and heterogeneous databases. One cannot overemphasize the importance and complexity of this challenge, but we hope to be able to face this challenge comfortably through the dedicated team of computer scientists at the Virtual Observatory group at INAOE. The techniques will be general enough as to be applicable to other scientific and industrial domains outside of astronomy.