The work for SFM breaks into 3 broad areas - developing statistical methods for looking for groupings of stars (and assigning a significance to how many neighbours they have), and the gas cores out of which they form; developing simulations to help address the physical mechanisms that underpin what we see in the real data; developing a software environment that makes all of this transparent to the end-user.
More specifically, new algorithms designed to analyse local clustering strength (INDICATE - broadly tests whether stars have more neighbours than expected from a uniform distribution), test for the presence of significant sub-groups (S2D2 - especially looking for small sub-groups of stars which may be a good guide to how they formed in the first place), and apply observational "selection functions" to the simulations which have been created, and all of these made public. A large suite of both N-body and full hydrodynamical models have been developed and also made public. In parallel with these scientific activities Quasar SR have created a complete infrastructure capable of acting as an interface between the user and the ESA archives, incorporating our algorithms along the way. The software to reproduce this is available both online as an active service at both Cardiff and Quasar, and as a download that can be installed on the end-user’s own computer.
Catalogues of stellar sub-groupings are already available for four clusters, and more are being added. A core catalogue has been created for the NGC 2264 region based on HOBYS Herschel data. Analysis of the stellar content of the same region has included the kinematical data for the first time, providing firm evidence for dynamical evolution.
Our work has continued to be published in the refereed literature, with seven papers already published, one more resubmitted after generally supportive referees comments, and a further three in the late stages of preparation. In addition, the final project conference attracted over 80 participants from around the world, and gave them the chance to see both the science being carried out by the project as well as the Quasar software environment in action in a well attended “hands-on” session.
Lastly, we feel we have reached a significant public audience for our work, and would like to highlight in particular the work relating to holograms by both Leeds and Quasar, as well as Quasar’s development for SFM science of their virtual reality system.
