Related papers: Is molecular gas necessary for star formation?
We investigate the relationship between HI, H_2, and the star formation rate (SFR) using azimuthally averaged data for seven CO-bright spiral galaxies. Contrary to some earlier studies based on global fluxes, we find that the SFR surface…
Dust enables low-mass stars to form from low-metallicity gas by inducing fragmentation of clouds via the cooling by its thermal emission. Dust may, however, be evacuated from star-forming clouds due to radiation force from massive stars. We…
I investigate the process of converting gas into stars within the framework of a standard cosmological model. By examining the set of objects grown in a combined N-body plus smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation with those obtained in…
The first stars in the Universe are predicted to have been much more massive than the Sun. Gravitational condensation accompanied by cooling of the primordial gas due to molecular hydrogen, yields a minimum fragmentation scale of a few…
The winds and radiation from massive stars clear out large cavities in the interstellar medium. These bubbles, as they have been called, impact their surrounding molecular clouds and may influence the formation of stars therein. Here we…
The early stages of star formation are closely related to the ambient conditions in the interstellar medium. Important questions such as dust abundance, size distribution, temperature distribution, fraction of molecular gas, fraction of…
Long-duration gamma-ray bursts are associated with the explosions of massive stars and are accordingly expected to reside in star-forming regions with molecular gas (the fuel for star formation). Previous searches for carbon monoxide (CO),…
Massive stars are very rare, but their extreme luminosities make them both the only type of young star we can observe in distant galaxies and the dominant energy sources in the universe today. They form rarely because efficient radiative…
In this review, I discuss some highlights of recent research on molecular gas in galaxies; large-scale CO maps of nearby galaxies are being made, which extend our knowledge on global properties, radial gradients, and spiral structure of the…
We use a suite of 3D simulations of star-forming molecular clouds, with and without stellar feedback, magnetic fields, and driven turbulence, to study the compression and expansion rates of the gas as functions of density. We show that,…
Nearby spiral galaxies show an extremely tight correlation between tracers of molecular hydrogen (H_2) in the interstellar medium (ISM) and tracers of recent star formation, but it is unclear whether this correlation is fundamental or…
The observed star formation rate of the Milky Way can be explained by applying a metallicity-dependent factor to convert CO luminosity to molecular gas mass and a star formation efficiency per free-fall time that depends on the virial…
To constrain the nature of the very first stars, we investigate the collapse and fragmentation of primordial, metal-free gas clouds. We explore the physics of primordial star formation by means of three-dimensional simulations of the dark…
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…
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…
Stars form by gravoturbulent fragmentation of interstellar gas clouds. The supersonic turbulence ubiquitously observed in Galactic molecular gas generates strong density fluctuations with gravity taking over in the densest and most massive…
Molecular clouds are a fundamental ingredient of galaxies: they are the channels that transform the diffuse gas into stars. The detailed process of how they do it is not completely understood. We review the current knowledge of molecular…
We describe an overall picture of galactic-scale star formation. Recent high-resolution magneto-hydrodynamical simulations of two-fluid dynamics with cooling/heating and thermal conduction have shown that the formation of molecular clouds…
Context. Interstellar dust particles, which represent 1% of the total mass, are recognized to be very powerful interstellar catalysts in star-forming regions. The presence of dust can have a strong impact on the chemical composition of…
One of the most important and well-established empirical results in astronomy is the Kennicutt-Schmidt (KS) relation between the density of interstellar gas and the rate at which that gas forms stars. A tight correlation between these…