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Giant molecular clouds (GMCs) and their stellar offspring are the building blocks of galaxies. The physical characteristics of GMCs and their evolution are tightly connected to galaxy evolution. The macroscopic properties of the…

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-08-11 Philip C. Myers , Mark Heyer , Ian W. Stephens , Simon Coudé , Nicole Karnath , Howard A. Smith

The evolution of giant molecular clouds (GMCs), the main sites of high-mass star formation, is an essential process to unravel the galaxy evolution. Using a GMC catalogue of M33 from ALMA-ACA survey, we classified 848 GMCs into three types…

Turbulence is thought to be a primary driving force behind the early stages of star formation. In this framework large, self gravitating, turbulent clouds fragment into smaller clouds which in turn fragment into even smaller ones. At the…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2016-03-17 David Guszejnov , Philip F. Hopkins

Using a compilation of 25 studies from the literature, we investigate the evolution of the star-forming galaxy (SFG) Main Sequence (MS) in stellar mass and star formation rate (SFR) out to $z \sim 6$. After converting all observations to a…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-19 Joshua S. Speagle , Charles L. Steinhardt , Peter L. Capak , John D. Silverman

We investigated the giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in M74 (NGC 628), using data obtained from the PHANGS project. We applied the GMC Types according to the activity of star formation: Type I without star formation, Type II with H$\alpha$…

Stars generally form faster than the ambipolar diffusion time, suggesting that several processes short circuit the delay and promote a rapid collapse. These processes are considered here, including turbulence compression in the outer parts…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Bruce G. Elmegreen

We present virial models for the global evolution of giant molecular clouds. Focusing on the presence of an accretion flow, and accounting for the amount of mass, momentum, and energy supplied by accretion and star formation feedback, we…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-28 Nathan J. Goldbaum , Mark R. Krumholz , Christopher D. Matzner , Christopher F. McKee

Stars form in supersonic turbulent molecular clouds that are self-gravitating. We present an analytic determination of the star formation rate (SFR) in a gravoturbulent medium based on the density probability distribution function of…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-08-22 Blakesley Burkhart

The relation between the stellar mass and the star formation rate characterizes how the instantaneous star formation is determined by the galaxy past star formation history and by the growth of the dark matter structures. We deconstruct the…

Giant molecular clouds (GMCs) are the sites of star formation and stellar feedback in galaxies. Their properties set the initial conditions for star formation and their lifecycles determine how feedback regulates galaxy evolution. In recent…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-03-21 Mélanie Chevance , Mark R. Krumholz , Anna F. McLeod , Eve C. Ostriker , Erik W. Rosolowsky , Amiel Sternberg

We present a unified description of the scenario of Global Hierarchical Collapse and fragmentation (GHC) in molecular clouds (MCs), owing to the continuous decrease of the average Jeans mass in the contracting cloud. GHC constitutes a…

Star formation in galaxies is inherently complex, involving the interplay of physical processes over a hierarchy of spatial scales. In this work, we investigate the connection between global (galaxy-scale) and local (cloud-scale) star…

The star formation rate - stellar mass relation (SFR-M*) and its evolution (i.e., the SFR main sequence) describes the growth rate of galaxies of a given stellar mass and at a given redshift. Assuming that present-day star-forming galaxies…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2012-01-17 Samuel N. Leitner

In this paper we study the process of the subsequent (runaway) fragmentation of the rotating isothermal Giant Molecular Cloud (GMC) complex. Our own developed Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) gas-dynamical model successfully reproduce…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 P. Berczik , M. I. Petrov

Star formation is inefficient. Only a few percent of the available gas in molecular clouds forms stars, leading to the observed low star formation rate (SFR). The same holds when averaged over many molecular clouds, such that the SFR of…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-22 Christoph Federrath

A star formation efficiency per free fall time that evolves over the life time of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) may have important implications for models of supersonic turbulence in molecular clouds or for the relation between star…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2011-06-03 R. Feldmann , N. Y. Gnedin

We suggest that molecular cloud (MC) turbulence is a consequence of the very process of MC formation by collisions of larger-scale flows in the diffuse atomic gas, which generate turbulence in the accumulated gas through bending- mode…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Enrique Vazquez-Semadeni , Javier Ballesteros-Paredes , Ralf Klessen

We present a simple, self-consistent model to predict the maximum masses of giant molecular clouds (GMCs), stellar clusters and high-redshift clumps as a function of the galactic environment. Recent works have proposed that these maximum…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2017-05-31 Marta Reina-Campos , J. M. Diederik Kruijssen

We present a one-dimensional radiation-hydrodynamic model of a spherically symmetric cloud evolving under the influence of the self-gravity and the feedback from a star cluster forming in its centre. On one hand, the model is simple due to…