Related papers: Star Formation Relations in Nearby Molecular Cloud…
Star formation on galactic scales is known to be a slow process, but whether it is slow on smaller scales is uncertain. We cross-correlate 5469 giant molecular clouds (GMCs) from a new all-sky catalog with 256 star forming complexes (SFCs)…
Over the past decade increasingly robust estimates of the dense molecular gas content in galaxy populations between redshift 0 and the peak of cosmic galaxy/star formation from redshift 1-3 have become available. This rapid progress has…
On average molecular clouds convert only a small fraction epsilon_ff of their mass into stars per free-fall time, but differing star formation theories make contrasting claims for how this low mean efficiency is achieved. To test these…
Observations show that star formation in galaxies is closely correlated with the abundance of molecular hydrogen. Modeling this empirical relation from first principles proves challenging, however, and many questions regarding its…
Stars and star clusters 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…
We present maps of 4 galactic giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in the J=2-1 emission of both CO and $^{13}$CO. We use an LTE analysis to derive maps of the CO excitation temperature and column density and the distribution of total molecular…
In a new simple model I reconcile two contradictory views on the factors that determine the rate at which molecular clouds form stars -- internal structure vs. external, environmental influences -- providing a unified picture for the…
Detailed observations of the nearest star-forming regions in the Milky Way (MW) provide the ultimate benchmark for studying star formation. The extent to which the results of these Galaxy-based studies can be extrapolated to extragalactic…
Studies by Lada (2010) and Heiderman (2010) have suggested that star formation mostly occurs above a threshold in gas surface density Sigma of Sigma_c = 120 Msun pc^{-2} (A_K = 0.8). Heiderman infer a threshold by combining low-mass…
We compare atomic gas, molecular gas, and the recent star formation rate (SFR) inferred from H-alpha in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). By using infrared dust emission and local dust-to-gas ratios, we construct a map of molecular gas that…
In our grid of multiphase chemical evolution models (Moll\'a & D\'iaz, 2005), star formation in the disk occurs in two steps: first, molecular gas forms, and then stars are created by cloud-cloud collisions or interactions of massive stars…
Observations have revealed prodigious amounts of star formation in starburst galaxies as traced by dust and molecular emission, even at large redshifts. Recent work shows that for both nearby spiral galaxies and distant starbursts, the…
A positive power-law trend between the local surface densities of molecular gas, $\Sigma_{gas}$, and young stellar objects, $\Sigma_{\star}$, in molecular clouds of the Solar Neighbourhood has been identified by Gutermuth et al. How it…
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…
Observational evidence from local star-forming regions mandates that star formation occurs shortly after, or even during, molecular cloud formation. Models of the formation of molecular clouds in large-scale converging flows have identified…
We investigate star formation at very early evolutionary phases in five massive clouds in the inner 500 pc of the Galaxy, the Central Molecular Zone. Using interferometer observations of H$_2$O masers and ultra-compact H II regions, we find…
We examine how the atomic and molecular gas components of galaxies evolve to higher redshifts using the semi-analytic galaxy formation models of Fu et al. (2010) in which we track the surface density profiles of gas in disks. We adopt two…
The processes regulating star formation in galaxies are thought to act across a hierarchy of spatial scales. To connect extragalactic star formation relations from global and kpc-scale measurements to recent cloud-scale resolution studies,…
We apply gravity-based and density-based methods to identify clouds in numerical simulations of the star-forming, three-phase interstellar medium (ISM), and compare their properties and their global correlation with the star formation rate…
Newborn stars form within the localized, high density regions of molecular clouds. The sequence and rate at which stars form in dense clumps and the dependence on local and global environments are key factors in developing descriptions of…