Cathie Clarke's group is currently focusing on analysing the results of large scale cluster formation simulations and comparing their predictions with observaional surveys of star forming regions.

Movie 3

Movie3 (by former PhD student Thomas Maschberger) shows the hierarchical assembly of a star cluster via successive sub-cluster mergers over a period of half a Myr: stars that will ultimately end up in the cluster are colour coded blue, the most massive star is coded red and the next five most massive are coded yellow. Another project (led by postdoc Nick Moeckel) involves the development of a high accuracy hybrid Nbody/SPH code in order to study cluster dissolution as a result of gas loss.

Movie 4

Movie4 demonstrates the results of a pilot study.