The origin and formation of stellar clusters remains a fundamental grand challenge in astrophysics that requires complex multi-physics simulations that must include a large range of coupled physical processes, including: self-gravity; supersonic turbulence; hydrodynamics; outflows; radiation and magnetic fields.

The High-ORbit Ultraviolet-visible Satellite (HORUS) is a 2.4-meter Probe-class space telescope concept designed to conduct a comprehensive and systematic study of the astrophysical processes and environments relevant for the births and life cycles of stars and their planetary systems, to investigate and understand the range of environments, feedback mechanisms, and other factors that most affect the outcome of the star and planet formation process.

A census of the stars and warm/cool gas in the Local Universe reveals that they account for only half of the baryons in the universe and about 10% of the metals. It is suggested that the missing baryons lie in hot gaseous extended halos around galaxies (1-5E6 K) as well as in the unvirialized cosmic web. We detect these hot halos around the Milky Way and external galaxies and find that, within the virial radius, the gaseous halos have masses comparable to the stellar masses, but still fall short of accounting for the missing baryons.

The James Webb Space Telescope, planned for launch in October 2018, will be the most powerful space telescope ever built.

Although SOFIA flies above greater than 95% of the Earth's atmospheric water vapor, the residual water can still affect the infrared signals seen by the SOFIA science instruments. A small dedicated instrument has been developed to measure this residual water vapor so that the astronomical IR signals can be properly corrected. The Water Vapor Monitor is permanently mounted in the upper deck of the SOFIA aircraft and observes the 183 GHz atmospheric water line in emission through a custom window.

FIFI-LS has flown 6 flight series, including one southern deployment. In this tele-talk, we present the current status of FIFI-LS, the successes of our data pipeline, and some of the new science results. We will discuss the large maps of the Orion Nebula in several far infrared cooling lines of ionic, atomic, and molecular species. These data enable a detailed study of the heating and cooling in the closest massive star forming region, providing some early results of analyzing the diagnostic fine-structure line ratios, gas and dust temperatures.

Optical and infrared continuum polarization is known to be due to irregular dust grains aligned with the local magnetic field.  This provides an important tool to probe the geometry and strength of those magnetic fields, particularly if the variations in the grain alignment efficiencies can be understood. In this study we combined archival photometric and spectroscopic data with the polarization survey of the North Galactic cap from Berdyugin et al. (2014), comparing it to the mapping of the Local Bubble by Lallement et al.

We present the unique capabilities of SOFIA to map the sizes of the Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) using the FORCAST and FLITECAM instruments. We create maps of the 11.2/3.3 µm ratio to probe the morphology of the PAH size distribution and the 8.0/11.2 µm ratio to probe the PAH ionization. The PAH sizes are obtained by making use of an emission model and of vibrational spectra from the NASA Ames PAH database.

The 30 Doradus region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) offers one of the best laboratories to examine in detail the interplay between stellar activity and a metal-poor interstellar medium (ISM). The Herschel/PACS and SPIRE/FTS observations of FIR fine structure lines, combined with Spitzer/IRS spectroscopic maps, have been used to constrain the physical conditions in the photo-dissociation regions (PDR) with the Meudon PDR code (Le Petit et al., 2006).