PHANGS: Constraining Star Formation Timescales Using the Spatial Correlations of Star Clusters and Giant Molecular Clouds
Abstract
In the hierarchical view of star formation, giant molecular gas clouds (GMCs) undergo fragmentation to form small-scale structures made up of stars and star clusters. Here we study the connection between young star clusters and cold gas across a range of extragalactic environments by combining the high resolution (1") PHANGS-ALMA catalogue of GMCs with the star cluster catalogues from PHANGS-HST. The star clusters are spatially matched with the GMCs across a sample of 11 nearby star-forming galaxies with a range of galactic environments (centres, bars, spiral arms, etc.). We find that after 4-6 Myr the star clusters are no longer associated with any gas clouds. Additionally, we measure the autocorrelation of the star clusters and GMCs as well as their cross-correlation to quantify the fractal nature of hierarchical star formation. Young ( 10 Myr) star clusters are more strongly autocorrelated on kpc and smaller spatial scales than the >10 Myr stellar populations, indicating that the hierarchical structure dissolves over time.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2209.02872,
title = {PHANGS: Constraining Star Formation Timescales Using the Spatial Correlations of Star Clusters and Giant Molecular Clouds},
author = {Jordan A. Turner and Daniel A. Dale and James Lilly and Mederic Boquien and Sinan Deger and Janice C. Lee and Bradley C. Whitmore and Gagandeep S. Anand and Samantha M. Benincasa and Frank Bigiel and Guillermo A. Blanc and Melanie Chevance and Eric Emsellem and Christopher M. Faesi and Simon C. O. Glover and Kathryn Grasha and Annie Hughes and Ralf S. Klessen and Kathryn Kreckel and J. M. Diederik Kruijssen and Adam K. Leroy and Hsi-An Pan and Erik Rosolowsky and Andreas Schruba and Thomas G. Williams},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.02872},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
15 pages, 11 figures, 4 tables. Accepted to MNRAS Sept 6 2022