Shock-induced star formation in a model of the Mice
Abstract
Star formation plays an important role in the fate of interacting galaxies. To date, most galactic simulations including star formation have used a density-dependent star formation rule designed to approximate a Schmidt law. Here, I present a new star formation rule which is governed by the local rate of energy dissipation in shocks. The new and old rules are compared using self-consistent simulations of NGC 4676; shock-induced star formation provides a better match to the observations of this system.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0402248,
title = {Shock-induced star formation in a model of the Mice},
author = {Joshua E. Barnes},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0402248},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
Submitted to MNRAS. 12 pages, 5 B&W figures, 2 color figures. See http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~barnes/sisfmm.html for a version with high-resolution figures, and http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~barnes/research/interaction_models/mice/index.html for animations of the simulations