Related papers: Molecular Cloud Formation and the Star Formation E…
At the highest stellar masses (log(\mstar) $\gtrsim$ 11.5 \msun), only a small fraction of galaxies are disk-like and actively star-forming objects. These so-called `super spirals' are ideal objects to better understand how galaxy evolution…
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…
Rich in HII regions, giant molecular clouds are natural laboratories to study massive stars and sequential star formation. The Galactic star forming complex W33 is located at l=~12.8deg and at a distance of 2.4 kpc, has a size of ~10 pc and…
We present single-dish (sub)millimeter observations of gas and dust in the Galactic high-mass star-forming region G19.61-0.23, with the aim of studying the large-scale properties and physical conditions of the molecular gas across the…
High-resolution CO maps of 9 molecular clouds in IC 10 are combined with the new measurement of the distance to this nearby metal poor galaxy to measure accurately the CO-to-H2 conversion factor. The result for IC 10 is combined with…
The gas accretion and star-formation histories of galaxies like the Milky Way remain an outstanding problem in astrophysics. Observations show that 8 billion years ago, the progenitors to Milky Way-mass galaxies were forming stars 30 times…
Our understanding of how molecular clouds form in the interstellar medium (ISM) would be greatly helped if we had a reliable observational tracer of the gas flows responsible for forming the clouds. Fine structure emission from singly…
Long and skinny molecular filaments running along Galactic spiral arms are known as "bones", since they make up the skeleton of the Milky Way. However, their origin is still an open question. Here, we compare spectral images of HI taken by…
Molecular hydrogen (H$_2$) formation and dissociation are key processes that drive the gas lifecycle in galaxies. Using the SImulating the LifeCycle of Molecular Clouds (SILCC) zoom-in simulation suite, we explore the utility of future…
The gravitational binding and star-forming properties of molecular clouds (MCs) in the Milky Way (MW) are estimated from CO cloud observations and from a model of pressure-bounded virial equilibrium (PVE). Two CO surveys are analyzed with…
Recent observations indicate that star formation occurs only in the molecular phase of a galaxy's interstellar medium. A realistic treatment of star formation in simulations and analytic models of galaxies therefore requires that one…
Studies both of entire galaxies and of local Galactic star formation indicate a dependency of a molecular cloud's star formation rate (SFR) on its dense gas mass. In external galaxies, such measurements are derived from HCN(1-0)…
Gas in galactic disks is collected by gravitational instabilities into giant atomic-molecular complexes, but only the inner, molecular parts of these structures are able to collapse to form stars. Determining what controls the ratio of…
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…
We study the molecular content and the star formation efficiency of 21 Blue Compact Dwarfs (BCDs). We present CO(1-0) and (2-1) observations, further supplemented with additional CO measurements and multiwavelength ancillary data from the…
We present 3D "zoom-in" simulations of the formation of two molecular clouds out of the galactic interstellar medium. We model the clouds - identified from the SILCC simulations - with a resolution of up to 0.06 pc using adaptive mesh…
We have performed Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations in $^{12}$CO($J=2-1$), $^{13}$CO($J=2-1$), C$^{18}$O($J=2-1$), $^{12}$CO($J=3-2$), $^{13}$CO($J=3-2$), and CS($J=7-6$) lines toward the active star-forming…
The conversion of gas into stars is a fundamental process in astrophysics and cosmology. Stars are known to form from the gravitational collapse of dense clumps in interstellar molecular clouds, and it has been proposed that the resulting…
We present a sub-grid model for star formation in galaxy simulations, incorporating molecular hydrogen ($\mathrm{H}_2$) production via dust grain condensation and its destruction through star formation and photodissociation. Implemented…
The relationship between the star formation rate and surface density of neutral gas within the disk of M33 is examined with new imaging observations of CO J=1-0 emission gathered with the FCRAO 14m telescope and IRAS HiRes images of the 60…