Conditions and Impact of Star Formation

The 5th Zermatt Symposium titled "Conditions and Impact of Star Formation: New Results with Herschel and Beyond", brought together experts on the dense interstellar medium, its physics and chemistry, and its relation to star formation. Following the long-term tradition of the Zermatt Symposia on the Interstellar Medium, the 2010 meeting sticked to the concept of a broad topical range, addressing all aspects from large scales in time and space, i.e., the cosmological evolution of star formation, down to the details of star formation in individual, local regions and to the micro-physics and chemistry interstellar dust and molecules and their excitation. The Symposium provided a rich overview of the development of this research field as a whole over the last 5 years, driven in particular by the latest observational results from the Herschel Space Observatory and other new facilities.