Princeton University SFIR: Star Formation/ISM Rendezvous

Feedback-driven bubbles reshape the interstellar medium and influence the progression of star formation on galactic scales.  Thanks to facilities including Gaia and JWST, we can now resolve the local environments of superbubbles in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies in unprecedented detail.  However, current methods for the identification of superbubbles struggle to simultaneously map bubbles and their surrounding structures (like molecular clouds and filaments) in a self-consistent framework.  We present a new method for the topological identification and geometric mapping of structures in astronomical images, informed by the technique of persistent homology from the field of computational algebraic topology.  We highlight two applications of this structure-finding method: first, to a parsec-resolution 3D dust map of the Solar Neighborhood, and second, to a sample of nearby galaxies observed with JWST.  We compare the properties of voids in these datasets to the Local Bubble within which our own Solar System resides, and explore the role that superbubbles may play in shaping galactic structure.