The starforge project

The STARFORGE (STAR FORmation in Gaseous Environments) Project is a multi-institution initiative to develop cutting-edge computer simulations of star formation, and to use them to tackle some of the biggest questions in star formation:

• Why do stars have the masses that they do?

• Why do stars form in clusters, and how do these clusters assemble?

• Why is star formation so slow and inefficient nearly everywhere we look?

• How do winds, radiation, jets, and and supernovae (feedback) affect the gas surrounding newborn stars?

The answers to all of these questions are interrelated, because star formation is a complex process involving many different pieces of physics working in concert. STARFORGE is about putting all of these elements together into a realistic simulation of a star-forming gas cloud.

For astronomers

STARFORGE uses a numerical framework implemented in the GIZMO code, which is designed to perform 3D radiation magnetohydrodynamics simulations of giant molecular clouds. We use GIZMO's Meshless Finite Mass MHD method in conjunction with GIZMO's various radiative transfer solvers, achieving spatial resolutions of a few 10AU , which allows us to to resolve the formation, motion, and feedback from individual stars forming in GMCs. We handle stellar dynamics with a high-order integrator, which is essential for following binaries over many orbits. We incorporate all of the most important feedback mechanisms: multi-band radiation, stellar winds, protostellar outflows, and supernovae. Our simulations are among the first to be able to incorporate all of these physics while predicting the IMF self-consistently from physical processes, as opposed to using sub-grid prescriptions that must assume an IMF. Our simulations are also the first to be able to do this in massive GMCs, in which most stars actually form.

For full details on how STARFORGE is implemented, please see the methods paper.