Gender equity remains a major issue facing the field of planetary science, and there is broad interest in addressing gender disparities within space science and related disciplines. Many studies of these topics have been performed by professional planetary scientists who are relatively unfamiliar with research in fields such as gender studies and sociology. As a result, they adopt a normative view of gender as a binary choice of 'male' or 'female,' leaving planetary scientists whose genders do not fit within that model out of such research entirely. Reductive frameworks of gender and an overemphasis on quantification as an indicator of gendered phenomena are harmful to people of marginalized genders, especially those who live at the intersections of multiple axes of marginalization such as race, disability, and socioeconomic status. In order for the planetary science community to best serve its marginalized members as we move into the next decade, a new paradigm must be established. This paper aims to address the future of gender equity in planetary science by recommending better survey practices and institutional policies based on a more profound approach to gender.

The stellar initial mass function (IMF) is fundamental for many areas of astrophysics, but its origin remains poorly understood. It may be inherited from the core mass function (CMF) or arise as a result of more chaotic, competitive accretion. Dense, gravitationally bound cores are seen in molecular clouds and some observations have suggested that the CMF is similar in shape to the IMF, though translated to higher masses by a factor of ∼3. Here we measure the CMF in 28 dense clumps within 3.5 kpc that are likely to be central regions of massive protoclusters, observed via 1.3 mm dust continuum emission by the ALMAGAL project. We identify 222 cores using the dendrogram algorithm with masses ranging from 0.04 to 252 M ⊙. We apply completeness corrections for flux and number recovery, estimated from core insertion and recovery experiments. At higher masses, the final derived CMF is well described by a single power law of the form dN / d log M ∝ M − α with α ≃ 0.94 ± 0.08. However, we find evidence of a break in this power-law behavior between ∼5 and 15 M ⊙, which is, to our knowledge, the first time such a break has been found in distant (≳1 kpc) regions by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. We compare this massive protocluster CMF with those derived using the same methods in the G286 protocluster and a sample of infrared dark clouds. The massive protocluster CMF is significantly different, i.e., containing more massive cores, which is a potential indication of the role of environment on the CMF and IMF.

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Compression in giant molecular cloud (GMC) collisions is a promising mechanism to trigger formation of massive star clusters and OB associations. We simulate colliding and non-colliding magnetised GMCs and examine the properties of prestellar cores, selected from projected mass surface density maps, including after synthetic ALMA observations. We then examine core properties, including mass, size, density, velocity, velocity dispersion, temperature and magnetic field strength. After four Myr, ∼1000 cores have formed in the GMC collision and the high-mass end of the core mass function (CMF) can be fit by a power law dN/dlogM∝M−α with α ≃ 0.7, i.e., relatively top-heavy compared to a Salpeter mass function. Depending on how cores are identified, a break in the power law can appear around a few × 10 M⊙. The non-colliding GMCs form fewer cores with a CMF with α ≃ 0.8 to 1.2, i.e., closer to the Salpeter index. We compare the properties of these CMFs to those of several observed samples of cores. Considering other properties, cores formed from colliding clouds are typically warmer, have more disturbed internal kinematics and are more likely to be gravitational unbound, than cores formed from non-colliding GMCs. The dynamical state of the protocluster of cores formed in the GMC-GMC collision is intrinsically subvirial, but can appear to be supervirial if the total mass measurement is affected by observations that miss mass on large scales or at low densities.