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The feedback budget
Massive stars pour winds, ionizing photons, and radiation pressure into the gas they were born in. This is the accounting: how much momentum each channel delivers, whether it clears the residual gas, and whether the young cluster stays bound once the gas is gone. The cluster and gas are a real gravoturb simulation; the budget is a per-channel momentum ledger, not a hydrodynamics run.
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components over time
Two questions, in the order the physics asks them. First: is the retained feedback momentum enough to lift the residual gas out of the cloud's potential? Then, if it is: do the stars stay bound once the gas — most of the mass — is gone? Across these six environments the gas is always expelled, and expelled fast, yet every cluster survives: they are born dynamically cold, so removing the gas cannot unbind stars already this deeply self-bound. The margin, and which channel does the clearing, is what changes with the environment — switch between them above.
The expanding shells implied by the time plot are analytic similarity solutions (Weaver winds, Spitzer H II fronts), and the gas here balloons outward as the budget clears it, revealing the bare cluster — a legible stand-in for the anisotropic champagne flows and blister breakouts a full radiation-hydrodynamics run resolves. That physics is what my research code models; this piece makes its accounting visible.