Speaker
Description
Young massive star clusters (YMCs) host the majority of all massive stars, and therefore represent a fundamental unit of stellar feedback in galaxies. Thanks to JWST’s unprecedented capabilities the critical yet poorly understood process of dust-embedded YMCs emerging from their parent giant molecular clouds (GMCs), and enabling feedback to affect the surrounding interstellar medium (ISM), can be observed in a variety of nearby galaxies for the first time. Here I will present ongoing work to identify and characterize emerging YMCs in both normal and starburst galaxies in the local Universe. By combining observations from 0.3-4.4um we have fit the spectral energy distributions (SED) of all 2207 YMC candidates in NGC 628 to derive physical quantities (age, mass, extinction, and dust properties), finding evidence for changes in the dust grain size distribution as YMCs emerge from their birth clouds. Further, with multi-band NIRCam observations in combination with the NIRSpec IFU we find variations in the near-infrared colors with both the Pa-alpha and 3.3um PAH line strength, suggesting a rapid evolutionary sequence (~3 Myr) as YMCs destroy their surrounding dust in the starburst nucleus of NGC 3256. The wide range of ISM physical conditions seen amongst nearby galaxies affords us a high-resolution look at how star formation activity evolves with environment.
