Related papers: Star Formation in Disks: Spiral Arms, Turbulence, …
We use hydrodynamical simulations of a Cartwheel-like ring galaxy, modelled as a nearly head-on collision of a small companion with a larger disc galaxy, to probe the evolution of the gaseous structures and flows, and to explore the…
Gaseous substructures such as feathers and spurs dot the landscape of spiral arms in disc galaxies. One of the candidates to explain their formation is the wiggle instability of galactic spiral shocks. We study the wiggle instability using…
We study the links between star formation history and structure for a large mass-selected galaxy sample at 0.05 < z_phot < 0.30. The galaxies inhabit a very broad range of environments, from cluster cores to the field. Using HST images, we…
We discuss the role of turbulence in cloud and star formation, as observed in numerical simulations of the interstellar medium. Turbulent compression at the interfaces of colliding gas streams is responsible for the formation of…
The observed rapid onset of star formation in molecular clouds requires rapid formation of dense fragments which can collapse individually before being overtaken by global gravitationally-driven flows. Many previous investigations have…
Recent observations have demonstrated a significant growth in the integrated stellar mass of the red sequence since z=1, dominated by a steadily increasing number of galaxies with stellar masses M* < 10^11 M_sun. In this paper, we use the…
This chapter reviews the nature of turbulence in the Galactic interstellar medium (ISM) and its connections to the star formation (SF) process. The ISM is turbulent, magnetized, self-gravitating, and is subject to heating and cooling…
Empirical star formation laws from the last 20 years are reviewed with a comparison to simulations. The current form in main galaxy disks has a linear relationship between the star formation rate per unit area and the molecular cloud mass…
Stellar clusters form by gravitational collapse of turbulent molecular clouds, with up to several thousand stars per cluster. They are thought to be the birthplace of most stars and therefore play an important role in our understanding of…
Star formation in strongly self-gravitating cloud cores should be similar at all redshifts, forming single or multiple stars with a range of masses determined by local magneto-hydrodynamics and gravity. The formation processes for these…
Spiral patterns in some disc galaxies have two arms in the centre, and three or more arms on the periphery. The same result is also obtained in numerical simulations of stellar and gaseous discs. We argue that such patterns may occur due to…
Stars form when filaments and dense cores in molecular clouds fragment and collapse due to self-gravity. In the most basic analyses of gravitational stability, the competition between self-gravity and thermal pressure sets the critical…
Star formation in galaxies relies on the availability of cold, dense gas, which, in turn, relies on factors internal and external to the galaxies. In order to provide a simple model for how star formation is regulated by various physical…
We derive an analytic prediction for the star formation rate in environments ranging from normal galactic disks to starbursts and ULIRGs in terms of the observables of those systems. Our calculation is based on three premises: (1) star…
Star formation triggering mechanisms are reviewed, including the direct compression of clouds and globules, the compression and collapse of molecular clouds at the edges of HII regions and supernovae, the expansion and collapse of giant…
High redshift disc galaxies are more gas rich, clumpier, and more turbulent than local Universe galaxies. This early era of galaxy formation imprints the distribution and kinematics of the stars that we observe today, but it is not yet well…
The inner few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way harbours gas densities, pressures, velocity dispersions, an interstellar radiation field and a cosmic ray ionisation rate orders of magnitude higher than the disc; akin to the environment found…
We review the properties of turbulent molecular clouds (MCs), focusing on the physical processes that influence star formation (SF). MC formation appears to occur during large-scale compression of the diffuse ISM driven by supernovae,…
Extragalactic starbursts induced by gravitational interactions can now be studied from z = ~0 to ~2. The evidence that mergers of gas-rich galaxies tend to trigger galaxy-wide starbursts is strong, both statistically and in individual cases…
We present an analytical model of the relation between the surface density of gas and star formation rate in galaxies and clouds, as a function of the presence of supersonic turbulence and the associated structure of the interstellar…