UC Irvine

Advances in available computing facilities, judiciously employed by our colleagues, have undoubtedly enhanced our understanding of the processes by which stars (and planets) form, from very diffuse gas to something you could almost live around. Nevertheless we remain very far from being able to describe (let alone explain) what is going on in many cases. And this is likely to remain true even as Moore's Law growth begins to hit its head against energy and power considerations. A large fraction of long-standing questions appear to have honest answers of the general form, yes and no, all of the above, or some of them are and some of them aren't. This includes many of my favorites, like triggering, formation of binary populations, and the role of magnetic fields. Rather few questions have actually been retired from the universe of discourse in recent years. © 2011 International Astronomical Union.