Related papers: Schmidt's Conjecture and Star Formation in Molecul…
We analyse extinction maps of nearby Giant Molecular Clouds to forge a link between driving processes of turbulence and modes of star formation. Our investigation focuses on cloud structure in the column density range above the self…
The rate at which interstellar gas is converted into stars, and its dependence on environment, is one of the pillars on which our understanding of the visible Universe is build. We present a comparison of the surface density of young stars…
We investigate the properties of "star forming regions" in a previously published numerical simulation of molecular cloud formation out of compressive motions in the warm neutral atomic interstellar medium, neglecting magnetic fields and…
We consider the effects of different star formation criteria on galactic scales, in high-resolution simulations with explicitly resolved GMCs and stellar feedback. We compare: (1) a self-gravity criterion (based on the local virial…
We investigate the formation and evolution of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in a Milky-Way-like disk galaxy with a flat rotation curve. We perform a series of 3D adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) numerical simulations that follow both the…
We perform calculations of isolated disc galaxies to investigate how the properties of the ISM, the nature of molecular clouds, and the global star formation rate depend on the level of stellar feedback. We adopt a simple physical model,…
It is well-established that a gas density gradient inside molecular clouds and clumps raises their star formation rate compared to what they would experience from a gas reservoir of uniform density. This effect should be observed in the…
The scaling relations between the gas content and star formation rate of galaxies provide useful insights into processes governing their formation and evolution. We investigate the emergence and the physical drivers of the global…
Modern extragalactic molecular gas surveys now reach the scales of star-forming giant molecular clouds (GMCs, 20-50 pc). Systematic variations in GMC properties with galaxy environment imply that clouds are not universally self-gravitating…
We investigate the relationship between the star formation rate (SFR) and dense molecular gas mass in the nuclei of galaxies. To do this, we utilize the observed 850 micron luminosity as a proxy for the infrared luminosity and SFR, and…
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…
We study the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation between average star formation rate and average cold gas surface density in the Hi dominated ISM of nearby spiral and dwarf irregular galaxies. We divide the galaxies into grid cells varying from…
We compare the mass functions of young star clusters (ages $\leq 10$ Myr) and giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in six galaxies that cover a large range in mass, metallicity, and star formation rate (LMC, M83, M51, NGC 3627, the Antennae, and…
We study the global star formation law - the relation between the gas and star formation rate (SFR) in a sample of 130 local galaxies with infrared (IR) luminosities spanning over three orders of magnitude (10^9-10^12 Lsun), which includes…
We compare the structure of molecular gas at $40$ pc resolution to the ability of gas to form stars across the disk of the spiral galaxy M51. We break the PAWS survey into $370$ pc and $1.1$ kpc resolution elements, and within each we…
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…
We use the star formation history of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) to place quantitative limits on the effect of tidal interactions and gas infall on the star formation and chemical enrichment history of the SMC. The coincident timing of…
We investigate star forming scaling relations using Bayesian inference on a comprehensive data sample of low- (z<0.1) and high-redshift (1<z<5) star forming regions. This full data set spans a wide range of host galaxy stellar mass ($M_{*}…
All stars are born in molecular clouds, and most in giant molecular clouds (GMCs), which thus set the star formation activity of galaxies. We first review their observed properties, including measures of mass surface density, Sigma, and…
The global Schmidt law of star formation provides a power-law relation between the surface densities of star-formation rate (SFR) and gas, and successfully explains plausible scenarios of galaxy formation and evolution. However, star…