Topic: Galaxy evolution

The Many Scales of Stellar Feedback – A Journey Across 9 Orders of Magnitude

Massive stars are among the most influential engines in the Universe, shaping their surroundings through radiation, winds, and supernovae driving turbulence, regulating star and planet formation, and seeding the next generations of stars. Their feedback not only sculpts the interstellar medium of galaxies but also sets key boundary conditions for processes that concern nearly every branch of astrophysics: the baryon cycle (an essential ingredient in galaxy evolution across cosmic time), the progenitor environments of gravitational wave sources, the chemical and dynamical histories of planetary systems, and the magnetic and radiative feedback mechanisms that regulate the lifetimes of molecular clouds.Despite this central role, our quantitative understanding of how feedback operates across different galactic environments – and across the history of the Universe – remains limited. This is now changing. Over the past decade, optical integral field units (IFUs) have enabled a revolution in resolved feedback studies, allowing us to simultaneously map the feedback-driving stars and the interstellar medium they energize across entire galaxies. I will present results mostly (nut not exclusively) from large IFU surveys of nearby galaxies that empirically link stellar feedback efficiency to local environmental conditions — from dwarf starburst galaxies to massive disks. I will discuss how these findings inform topics ranging from cosmic reionization to binary evolution pathways and planet-forming environments, and I will highlight how IFU datasets are unexpectedly revealing new, serendipitous phenomena that challenge our feedback models and open fresh discovery space across astrophysics.