ITC Colloquium - Stella Offner (UTexas Austin)
Date and Time
Location
"Our Lonely Sun: How Multiple Star Systems Form (or don’t)"
Most stars are born with one or more stellar companions. Observational advances over the last decade have enabled high-resolution, interferometric studies of forming multiple systems and statistical surveys of multiplicity in star-forming regions. These have yielded new insights into how such systems form and how multiplicity affects disk evolution and planetary architectures. In this talk, I will review recent observational discoveries of the youngest multiple systems. I will present the results of star cluster simulations modeling the formation and evolution of multiple systems, and I will discuss the role of dynamics and environment in setting stellar multiplicity. Finally, I will highlight remaining numerical and observational challenges.