Related papers: Large-Scale Gravitational Instability and Star For…
The formation of stars from gas drives the evolution of galaxies. Yet, it remains one of the hardest processes to understand when trying to connect observations of stellar and galaxy populations to models of large scale structure formation.…
Until recently, simulations that modeled entire galaxies were restricted to an isothermal or fixed 2- or 3-phase interstellar medium (ISM). This obscured the full role of the ISM in shaping the observed galactic-scale star formation…
Young galaxies are clumpy, gas-rich, and highly turbulent. Star formation appears to occur by gravitational instabilities in galactic disks. The high dispersion makes the clumps massive and the disks thick. The star formation rate should be…
Star formation in galaxies is inefficient, and understanding how star formation is regulated in galaxies is one of the most fundamental challenges of contemporary astrophysics. Radiative cooling, feedback from supernovae and active galactic…
Context. There is a contradiction between the characteristic spacings in observed regular chains of star-forming regions in the spiral arms of galaxies, ~500 pc, and the estimates of the wavelength of gravitational instability in them, >1…
We present the results of a numerical simulation in which star formation proceeds from an initially unbound molecular cloud core. The turbulent motions, which dominate the dynamics, dissipate in shocks leaving a quiescent region which…
(Abridged) The formation of molecular clouds (MCs) from the diffuse interstellar gas appears to be a necessary step for star formation, as young stars invariably occur within them. However, the mechanisms controlling the formation of MCs…
Star formation is intimately linked to the dynamical evolution of molecular clouds. Turbulent fragmentation determines where and when protostellar cores form, and how they contract and grow in mass via accretion from the surrounding cloud…
We applied a criterion of gravitational instability, valid for two-component and infinitesimally thin discs, to observational data along the major axis for 7 spiral galaxies of early types. Unlike most papers, the dispersion equation…
Using the data obtained with the Spitzer Space telescope as part of the Surveying the Agents of a Galaxy's Evolution (SAGE) legacy survey, we have studied the variations of the dust composition and abundance across the Large Magellanic…
(Abridged) The building blocks of galaxies are star clusters. These form with low-star formation efficiencies and, consequently, loose a large part of their stars that expand outwards once the residual gas is expelled by the action of the…
Over the past decade increasingly robust estimates of the dense molecular gas content in galaxy populations between redshift 0 and the peak of cosmic galaxy/star formation from redshift 1-3 have become available. This rapid progress has…
The clustered nature of star formation should produce a high degree of structure in the combined phase and chemical space in the Galactic disk. To date, observed structure of this kind has been mostly limited to bound clusters and moving…
We develop a model for the outer gravitationally unstable regions of accretion disks around massive black holes, for primeval or solar abundances. First we study star formation and evolution in a purely gaseous marginally unstable disk, and…
Star formation by gravitational instabilities, sequential triggering, and turbulence triggering are briefly reviewed in order to compare the various mechanisms that are observed in main galaxy disks with those in the inner kiloparsec…
The observed discrete multiple stellar populations and internal abundance spreads in r- and s-process elements within globular clusters (GCs) have been suggested to be explained self-consistently by discrete star formation events over a…
The Magellanic Clouds provide the only laboratory to study the effect of metallicity and galaxy mass on molecular gas and star formation at high (~20 pc) resolution. We use the dust emission from HERITAGE Herschel data to map the molecular…
It has been known for more than 30 years that star formation in giant molecular clouds (GMCs) is slow, in the sense that only ~1% of the gas forms stars every free-fall time. This result is entirely independent of any particular model of…
Understanding the physics of how stars form is a highly-prioritized goal of modern Astrophysics, in part because star formation is linked to both galactic dynamics on large scales and to the formation of planets on small scales. It is…
We investigate star formation at very early evolutionary phases in five massive clouds in the inner 500 pc of the Galaxy, the Central Molecular Zone. Using interferometer observations of H$_2$O masers and ultra-compact H II regions, we find…