The Nursery as Decoupling: Stellar Formation as Graceful Dispersal from Galactic-Scale Coupling Events

Molecular clouds and stellar nurseries are not the genesis points of star formation — they are receipts. A molecular cloud forms when matter decouples gracefully from a larger coupling geometry: a spiral arm passage, a galaxy interaction, or a tidal compression. The stellar birth cluster inheriting from that nursery carries three nested levels of lock trace memory — the ghost axis of the cluster, the orientation geometry of the nursery, and the galactic coupling event that produced the cloud. Gaia-testable predictions are derived for nursery orientation alignment, dissolution timescale scaling, and ghost axis readability from escapee star kinematics. GCT Paper 47 of 49.