Abstract

In this talk I will present results from the STARFORGE project that are the first ever cloud-scale radiation-magnetohydrodynamic simulations that follow individual stars and include detailed gas thermodynamics, as well as stellar feedback in the form of protostellar jets, stellar radiation, winds and supernovae. This suite includes a large number of runs with different combinations of physical processes as well as varied initial conditions, allowing us to disentangle the effects of different physical mechanisms and to describe them as a function of the initial condition. Our results show that radiative feedback is essential in quenching star formation and disrupting the cloud, however the mass scale of the IMF is still predominantly set by magnetic fields and protostellar jet physics. We find the effects of stellar winds to be minor in our simulations, similar to supernovae that happen too late to affect the IMF or quench star formation. We find that the star formation history of a cloud is strongly dependent on its initial condition, but the final, post-disruption stellar population (i.e., IMF) is insensitive to most cloud properties (e.g., surface density, level of turbulence), providing an explanation to the observed near-universality of the IMF in the Galaxy.