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Star formation in galaxies are governed by the complex interplay of several nonlinear physical mechanisms operating in the interstellar medium (ISM). However, in spite of the underlying complexity, there is overwhelming evidence for fundamental scaling relations and trends governing the conversion of gas to stars that seem to imply a self-regulating agent at play -- studies over the past decade have highlighted that stellar feedback play the role of this self-regulating agent. Specifically, the radiation emitted by young massive stars have been shown to play a pivotal role in regulating the star formation efficiency in, and controlling the evolutionary cycle of, GMCs in weakly star-forming galaxies in the local Universe. In this talk, I will present work done in my thesis that extends and tests this picture on highly massive, compact GMCs, typical of high-pressure environments such as rare infrared-bright merging galaxies (ULIRGs) in the local universe, and more commonly at earlier redshifts. These GMCs form so-called super star clusters (SSCs; e.g. in M82), whose highly compact, bound nature have garnered interest in their potential role as precursors of globular clusters. I will highlight novel numerical techniques we developed to model the radiation emitted by massive stars and their interaction with dusty gas (radiation hydrodynamics), which vastly improves over earlier methods in the literature, and alleviates the technical difficulties involved in modelling the aforementioned regime. I will focus on the similarities and differences of star formation and feedback in this regime with GMCs typical of Milky Way-like galaxies, and explore their implications on the evolution of SSCs and the larger-scale ISM. I will also discuss how radiation feedback sculpts the turbulent ISM locally in HII regions, modifies the dynamical properties of gas and magnetic fields in them, and contemplate what this might imply for the possibility that additional star formation may be triggered locally by feedback. |
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