Caltech/IPAC Seminar

Due to their enormous luminosities, massive stars (M ≥ 8 solar masses) impact a vast range of processes, from the reionization of the universe to galaxy evolution and the formation of star clusters and planets. Yet, due to their extreme nature and rarity, a key question remains: do the observed differences between massive and low-mass stars reflect fundamentally distinct formation mechanisms, or is massive star formation a scaled-up version of the low-mass star formation process? In this talk, I will present projects studying massive star formation across a range of physical scales, from protostellar cores and environments to the innermost disk-forming regions around protostars. Synthesizing observations from facilities including ALMA, SOFIA, Herschel, Spitzer, and emerging JWST analyses, we search for links between the properties of disk–protostar systems, their outflows, and their natal environments to constrain the conditions required for massive star formation.