Understanding the Formation and Early Evolution of Star Clusters

It is believed that the majority of the stars, if not all, form in a clustered environment. The crowded environment in which stars form determines the properties of stars themselves – the mass distribution at the time of birth, stellar multiplicity distributions, circumstellar disks, and probably their planetary properties as well. However, due to complex physical and dynamical processes, understanding the formation and subsequent evolution of star clusters remains an enigmatic phenomenon to astronomers. In particular, we have yet to understand the scarcity of massive young clusters in our Galaxy, even though our Galaxy is host to many massive clouds. In this talk, the speaker shall discuss the formation and dissolution processes of star clusters and present the results of a few case studies obtained with multi-wavelength observations. Towards the end, the speaker shall highlight why massive clusters are rare in our Galaxy and how a massive embedded cluster cloud potentially ends up being an unbound open cluster after only a fraction of its lifetime.