why do stars usually form in groups called clusters rather than in isolation?
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Space has a bunch of dust and gases in it. Gravity pulls the dust and gases together in space. These gases eventually get so big and dense that it forms a star or groups of stars. The gravity will pull these stars together to make formations or merge the stars into even larger stars.
If you look at our Solar system, it was initially a gas/dust cloud. Then stuff began converging in the middle, forming a heavier blob of gas/dust, which through gravity attracted more gas and dust until it was massive enough to ignite into a star. And far away from the star gas and dust grouped into smaller blobs that eventually formed planets.
If you scale up to the bigger space, you have the same gas/dust clouds, some smaller and some bigger. If put close enough together, gravity will pull them all towards some center of mass. But within each cloud stuff will be clumping up and forming stars. And now you have a bunch of stars being formed in a cluster.
The easy answer is gravity. Just like gravity pulled gas and dust together to form stars and planets, it’s pulling stars into a disc around galaxies, and it’s pulling galaxies together into clusters, and clusters into superclusters.
The more complicated answer is that gas and dust weren’t distributed evenly in the early universe. As we understand it today, all of the energy in the universe was once packed into a space so tight that the universe couldn’t keep it smooth and even. Imagine looking at the asphalt on the road through a microscope. Even though the road is “flat”, once you zoom in far enough, it’s actually really rough, with huge rocks and valleys at the tiniest of scales. The universe works the same way. And so when the Big Bang happened, and the universe expanded to about as big as it is today, the rough way that all of that energy was distributed when it was tiny got magnified to be the size of the whole universe, and so all of that matter and energy followed the same shape that the universe looked like it was in at the beginning. This kept lots of gas and dust bunched up together in some parts of the universe, and left wide open spaces with nothing in them in others. The spots that had gas and dust bunched up together are where most of the stars, galaxies, and clusters ended up.
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