May 20, 2022

The 2022 winner of the Best Student Talk at the Canadian Astronomical Society annual general meeting, selected by CASCA’s Graduate Student Committee, is McMaster Ph.D. student Jeremy Karam. Jeremy’s talk was titled “Modelling Young Massive Cluster Formation: Mergers”. His work, in collaboration with his supervisor, Dr Alison Sills, has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Jeremy models mergers of young star clusters through detailed physical treatment of both the gas in the cluster, and the stars that have already formed. Previous simulations of massive cluster formation, and observations of the youngest clusters, both tell us that these mergers are a common way of building up larger clusters. Jeremy’s work is the first to model this process in detail and lets us understand how the stars and gas are affected by the merger.