Related papers: On column density thresholds and the star formatio…
The processes which regulate the star-formation within molecular clouds are still not well understood. Various star-formation scaling relations have been proposed to explain this issue by formulating a relation between star-formation rate…
The density of cosmic rays inside molecular clouds determines the ionization rate in the dense cores where stars form. It is also one of the drivers of astrochemistry leading to the creation of complex molecules. Through Fermi Large Area…
We examine the physical parameters that affect the accumulation of gas in molecular clouds to high column densities where the formation of stars takes place. In particular, we analyze the dense gas mass fraction (DGMF) in a set of…
We compute the star formation rate (SFR) in molecular clouds (MCs) that originate {\it ab initio} in a new, higher-resolution simulation of supernova-driven turbulence. Because of the large number of well-resolved clouds with…
Based on simple physical and geometric assumptions, we have calculated the mean surface molecular density of spiral galaxies at the threshold between star formation induced by cloud-cloud collision and spontaneous gravitational collapse.…
We reassess the applicability of the Toomre criterion in galactic disks and we study the local star formation law in 16 disk galaxies for which abundance gradients are published. The data we use consists of stellar light profiles, atomic…
Constraining the physical and chemical evolution of molecular clouds is essential to our understanding of star formation. These investigations often necessitate knowledge of some local representative number density of the gas along the line…
A large fraction of the gas in the Galaxy is cold, dense, and molecular. If all this gas collapsed under the influence of gravity and formed stars in a local free-fall time, the star formation rate in the Galaxy would exceed that observed…
Stars generally form in aggregates, some of which are bound ('clusters') while others are unbound and disperse on short ($\sim10$ Myr) timescales ('associations'). The fraction of stars forming in bound clusters ($\Gamma$) is a fundamental…
To develop galaxy-targeting approaches, the gravitational-wave community built a catalog of stellar mass in the local universe based on the 2MASS spectroscopic and photometric redshift surveys. By cleaning and supplementing this catalog,…
We present the first study of the relationship between the column density distribution of molecular clouds within nearby Galactic spiral arms and their evolutionary status as measured from their stellar content. We analyze a sample of 195…
We review recent advances in the analytical and numerical modeling of the star formation rate in molecular clouds and discuss the available observational constraints. We focus on molecular clouds as the fundamental star formation sites,…
The first stars, galaxies, star clusters, and direct-collapse black holes are expected to have formed in low-mass ($\sim$$10^{5}-10^{9} ~ M_{\odot}$) haloes at Cosmic Dawn ($z \sim 10 - 30$) under conditions of efficient gas cooling,…
We examine the star formation rates (SFRs) of galaxies in a redshift slice encompassing the z=0.834 cluster RX J0152.7-1357. We used a low-dispersion prism in the Inamori Magellan Areal Camera and Spectrograph (IMACS) to identify galaxies…
(Abridged) We assemble a sample of 3258 low-redshift galaxies from the SDSS DR6 with complementary photometric observations by GALEX, 2MASS and IRAS at far-ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. We use a recent, simple but physically…
Understanding star formation is problematic as it originates in the large scale dynamics of a galaxy but occurs on the small scale of an individual star forming event. This paper presents the first numerical simulations to resolve the star…
We invoke star formation triggered by cloud-cloud collisions to explain global star formation rates of disk galaxies and circumnuclear starbursts. Previous theories based on the growth rate of gravitational perturbations ignore the…
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…
Initial conditions for star formation in clusters are estimated for protostars whose masses follow the initial mass function (IMF) from 0.05 to 10 solar masses. Star-forming infall is assumed equally likely to stop at any moment, due to gas…
We use the COMPLETE Survey's observations of the Perseus star-forming region to assess and intercompare three methods for measuring column density in molecular clouds: extinction mapping (NIR); thermal emission mapping (FIR); and mapping…