Related papers: Is molecular gas necessary for star formation?
To investigate how molecular clouds react to different environmental conditions at a galactic scale, we present a catalogue of giant molecular clouds resolved down to masses of $\sim 10$~M$_{\odot}$ from a simulation of the entire disc of…
We have performed a multi-transition CO study of the centers of seven double-barred galaxies that exhibit a variety of molecular gas morphologies to determine if the molecular gas properties are correlated with the nuclear morphology and…
Cosmic gas makes up about 90% of baryonic matter in the Universe and H$_2$ is the closest molecule to star formation. In this work we study cold neutral gas and its H$_2$ component at different epochs, exploiting state-of-the-art…
Observations indicate that massive stars form in regions of very high surface density, ~1 g cm^-2. Clusters containing massive stars and globular clusters have a comparable column density. The total pressure in clouds of such a column…
We analyze $Chandra$ observations of the hot atmospheres of 40 early spiral and elliptical galaxies. Using new temperature, density, cooling time, and mass profiles, we explore relationships between their hot atmospheres and cold molecular…
We investigate the triggering of star formation in clouds that form in Galactic scale flows as the ISM passes through spiral shocks. We use the Lagrangian nature of SPH simulations to trace how the star forming gas is gathered into…
Stars form in the dense interiors of molecular clouds. The dynamics and physical properties of the atomic interstellar medium (ISM) set the conditions under which molecular clouds and eventually stars will form. It is, therefore, critical…
We investigate the dependence of stellar properties on the initial kinematic structure of the gas in star-forming molecular clouds. We compare the results from two large-scale hydrodynamical simulations of star cluster formation that…
We investigate the dependence of stellar properties on the initial mean density of the molecular cloud in which stellar clusters form using radiation hydrodynamical simulations that resolve the opacity limit for fragmentation. We have…
We present an analysis of 55 central galaxies in clusters and groups with molecular gas masses and star formation rates lying between $10^{8}-10^{11}\ M_{\odot}$ and $0.5-270$ $M_{\odot}\ yr^{-1}$, respectively. We have used Chandra…
In Meidt et al. (2018), we showed that gas kinematics on the scale of individual molecular clouds are not dominated by self-gravity but also track a component that originates with orbital motion in the potential of the host galaxy. This…
Within collapsing protogalaxies, thermal instability leads to the formation of a population of cool fragments which are confined by the pressure of a residual hot background medium. The critical mass required for the cold clouds to become…
We introduce a model for the large-scale, global 3D structure of molecular clouds. Motivated by the morphological appearance of clouds in surface density maps, we model clouds as cylinders, with the aim of backing out information about the…
We study the H2 photodissociation regions around OB stars in primordial gas clouds whose virial temperatures are between a few hundred and a few thousand Kelvin. In such small objects, a single O star can photodissociate a mass equal to…
Star formation takes place in the dense gas phase, and therefore a simple dense gas and star formation rate relation has been proposed. With the advent of multi-beam receivers, new observations show that the deviation from linear relations…
To understand the conditions under which dense, molecular gas is able to form within a galaxy, we post-process a series of three-dimensional galactic-disk-scale simulations with ray-tracing based radiative transfer and chemical network…
We use simple analytic reasoning to identify physical processes that drive the evolution of the cosmic star formation density in cold dark matter universes. Based on our analysis, we formulate a model to characterise the redshift dependence…
The star formation history of galaxies is a complex process usually considered to be stochastic in nature, for which we can only give average descriptions such as the color-density relation. In this work we follow star-forming gas particles…
Molecular hydrogen (H2) is the primary component of the reservoirs of cold, dense gas that fuel star formation in our galaxy. While the H2 abundance is ultimately regulated by physical processes operating on small scales in the interstellar…
Over the last decade, observations of the cool interstellar medium in distant galaxies via molecular and atomic fine structure line emission has gone from a curious look into a few extreme, rare objects, to a mainstream tool to study galaxy…