SIMBAD references

We discuss the mechanism of cluster formation in a numerical simulation of a molecular cloud (MC) undergoing global hierarchical collapse, focusing on how the gas motions in the parent cloud control the assembly of the cluster. The global collapse implies that the star formation rate (SFR) increases over time. The collapse is hierarchical because it consists of small-scale collapses within larger scale ones. The latter culminate a few Myr later than the first small-scale ones and consist of filamentary flows that accrete on to massive central clumps. The small-scale collapses consist of clumps that are embedded in the filaments and falling on to the large-scale collapse centres. The stars formed in the early, small-scale collapses share the infall motion of their parent clumps, so that the filaments feed both gas and stars to the massive central clump. This process leads to the presence of a few older stars in a region where new protostars are forming, and also to a self-similar structure, in which each unit is composed of smaller scale subunits that approach each other and may merge. Because the older stars formed in the filaments share the infall motion of the gas on to the central clump, they tend to have larger velocities and to be distributed over larger areas than the younger stars formed in the central clump. Finally, interpreting the initial mass function (IMF) simply as a probability distribution implies that massive stars only form once the local SFR is large enough to sample the IMF up to high masses. In combination with the increase of the SFR, this implies that massive stars tend to appear late in the evolution of the MC, and only in the central massive clumps. We discuss the correspondence of these features with observed properties of young stellar clusters, finding very good qualitative agreement.