Near-Infrared Observations of Clustered Massive Star Formation in Outflowing Region AFGL 5180

Massive stars are significant throughout the universe, as they impact their surroundings from the early stages of their formation until they die in the form of supernova. Observations in the near-infrared (NIR) of the bright and large-scale (~pc) jets which young stars ubiquitously produce during their formation process can place important constraints on the phenomenon of massive star formation. Here, we present a detailed NIR view of the star-forming region AFGL 5180 utilizing imaging from the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) with both seeing-limited and extremely high-resolution (~90 mas) Adaptive Optics data, as well as imaging from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This unprecedented view into the AFGL 5180 complex reveals highly clustered star formation, evidenced by the presence of several omnidirectional outflows and confirmed by the detection of over a dozen grouped compact sources using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA). The results indicate that both low- and high-mass star formation is occurring in AFGL 5180 in a crowded manner, shedding light on the process of star formation.