RSAA Colloquia / Seminars / Feast-of-Facts: Tuesday, 20 September 2022, 11:00-12:00; DLT & ZOOM


Stella Offner

"Our Lonely Sun: How Multiple Star Systems Form (or don't)"

Most stars are born with one or more companions. Observational advances over the last decade have enabled high-resolution, interferometric studies of forming multiple systems and statistical surveys of multiplicity in star-forming regions. These have yielded new insights into how such systems form and how multiplicity affects disk evolution and planetary architectures. In this talk, I will review recent observational discoveries of the youngest multiple systems. I will present the results of star cluster simulations modeling the formation and evolution of multiple systems, and I will discuss the role of dynamics and environment in setting stellar multiplicity. Finally, I will highlight remaining numerical and observational challenges.