Embedded Clusters

TL;DR

This paper reviews the properties of embedded star clusters within molecular cloud complexes, emphasizing the importance of viewing star formation as a large-scale process rather than isolated cluster events.

Contribution

It provides an overview of embedded clusters and complexes, highlighting their properties and the implications for understanding star formation at molecular cloud scales.

Findings

Embedded clusters are part of larger complexes spanning tens of parsecs.

Star formation is better understood as a molecular-cloud scale process.

Infrared observations have advanced the study of embedded clusters.

Abstract

The past decade has seen an increase of star formation studies made at the molecular cloud scale, motivated mostly by the deployment of a wealth of sensitive infrared telescopes and instruments. Embedded clusters, long recognised as the basic units of coherent star formation in molecular clouds, are now seen to inhabit preferentially cluster complexes tens of parsecs across. This chapter gives an overview of some important properties of the embedded clusters in these complexes and of the complexes themselves, along with the implications of viewing star formation as a molecular-cloud scale process rather than an isolated process at the scale of clusters.