English

Galactic structure dependence of cloud-cloud collisions driven star formation in the barred galaxy NGC 3627

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2025-02-11 v1

Abstract

While cloud-cloud collisions (CCCs) have been proposed as a mechanism for triggering massive star formation, it is suggested that higher collision velocities (vcolv_{\rm col}) and lower GMC mass (MGMCM_{\rm GMC}) or/and density (ΣGMC\Sigma_{\rm GMC}) tend to suppress star formation. In this study, we choose the nearby barred galaxy NGC 3627 to examine the SFR and SFE of a colliding GMC (mCCCm^\star_{\rm CCC} and ϵCCC\epsilon_{\rm CCC}) and explore the connections between mCCCm^\star_{\rm CCC} and ϵCCC\epsilon_{\rm CCC}, MGMCM_{\rm GMC}(ΣGMC\Sigma_{\rm GMC}) and vcolv_{\rm col}, and galactic structures (disk, bar, and bar-end). Using ALMA CO(2--1) data (60~pc resolution), we estimated vcolv_{\rm col} within 500~pc apertures, based on line-of-sight GMC velocities, assuming random motion in a two-dimensional plane. We extracted apertures where at least 0.1 collisions occur per 1 Myr, identifying them as regions dominated by CCC-driven star formation, and then calculated mCCCm^\star_{\rm CCC} and ϵCCC\epsilon_{\rm CCC} using attenuation-corrected Hα\alpha data from VLT MUSE. We found that both mCCCm^\star_{\rm CCC} and ϵCCC\epsilon_{\rm CCC} are lower in the bar (median values: 103.84 M10^{3.84}~M_\odot and 0.18 %0.18~\%), and higher in the bar-end (104.89 M10^{4.89}~M_\odot and 1.10 %1.10~\%) compared to the disk (104.28 M10^{4.28}~M_\odot and 0.75 %0.75~\%). Furthermore, we found that structural differences within the parameter space of vcolv_{\rm col} and MGMCM_{\rm GMC}(ΣGMC\Sigma_{\rm GMC}), with higher MGMCM_{\rm GMC}(ΣGMC\Sigma_{\rm GMC}) in the bar-end and higher vcolv_{\rm col} in the bar compared to the disk, lead to higher star formation activity in the bar-end and lower activity in the bar. Our results support the scenario that variations in CCC properties across different galactic structures can explain the observed differences in SFE on a kpc scale within a disk galaxy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.06102,
  title  = {Galactic structure dependence of cloud-cloud collisions driven star formation in the barred galaxy NGC 3627},
  author = {Fumiya Maeda and Kouji Ohta and Fumi Egusa and Yusuke Fujimoto and Masato I. N. Kobayashi and Shin Inoue and Asao Habe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.06102},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

20 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ