Speaker
Description
Gaia is revolutionising our understanding of the Milky Way and can be used for research in many different areas of astronomy, ranging from solar system science to quasars. One field where the Gaia astrometry excels is the study of so-called runaway stars. Runaway stars move away from their birth region with a high peculiar velocity. The high-mass runaway stars can efficiently and effectively deposit their feedback into the interstellar medium, and can therefore significantly affect the ambient medium. The production rate and properties of high-mass runaway stars has been a topic for decades now and is hotly debated. In this talk, we will show how we have used Gaia DR3 to find 55 high-mass runaway stars ejected from the young cluster R136, situated in the starburst region 30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud (Stoop et al. 2024, Nature, 634, 809). The large number of high-mass runaways allow us to investigate the early evolution of the cluster. We found that 23-33% of the most luminous stars initially born in R136 are runaways. We show how these new insights have major implications for N-body simulations of young clusters and for hydrodynamical simulations of the interstellar and galactic medium. We will highlight the many key results that have been obtained on the topic of high-mass runaway stars over the past few years with Gaia in the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds. Last, we will show what the exciting opportunities are with the upcoming Gaia DR4 in this field.
| Talk category | NOVA Network 2 |
|---|---|
| Preference for a talk or poster | Talk |
