The Violent, Mysterious Dynamics of Star Formation: Lighting up the universe is a rough-and-tumble business

They are kind of a theorist’s dream.” These early models paid scant attention to the way infant stars might influence each other. “Before we could understand how neighbors affect individual star formation,” explains Arce’s former thesis advisor, Alyssa Goodman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “we had to understand the evolution of stars in isolation. That was pretty complicated in itself.