Related papers: How galactic environment regulates star formation
Stars form from molecular gas under complex conditions influenced by multiple competing physical mechanisms, such as gravity, turbulence, and magnetic fields. However, accurately identifying the fraction of gas actively involved in star…
Young stars form on a wide range of scales, producing aggregates and clusters with various degrees of gravitational self-binding. The loose aggregates have a hierarchical structure in both space and time that resembles interstellar…
Star clusters are known to be formed in turbulent molecular clouds. How turbulence is driven in molecular clouds and what effect this has on star formation is still unclear. We compare a simulation setup with turbulent driving everywhere in…
The conversion of gas into stars is a fundamental process in astrophysics and cosmology. Stars are known to form from the gravitational collapse of dense clumps in interstellar molecular clouds, and it has been proposed that the resulting…
We study gravitational instability and consequent star formation in a wide range of isolated disk galaxies, using three-dimensional, smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations at resolution sufficient to fully resolve gravitational…
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…
Star formation is intimately linked to the dynamical evolution of molecular clouds. Turbulent fragmentation determines where and when protostellar cores form, and how they contract and grow in mass via accretion from the surrounding cloud…
In order to study whether there is any correlation between nuclear activities, gas content, and the environment where galaxies reside, we have obtained optical and millimetric spectra for a well-defined sample of intermediate Hubble type…
The gas supply from the cosmic web is the key to sustain star formation in galaxies. It remains to be explored how the cosmic large-scale structure (LSS) effects on galaxy evolution at given local environments. We examine galaxy specific…
We present a new model to describe the star formation process in galaxies, which includes the description of the different gas phases -- molecular, atomic, and ionized -- together with its metal content. The model, which will be coupled to…
Observations of external galaxies and of local star-forming clouds in the Milky Way have suggested a variety of star formation laws, i.e., simple direct relations between the column density of star formation (Sigma_SFR: the amount of gas…
The interstellar medium of galaxies is composed of multiple phases, including molecular, atomic, and ionized gas, as well as dust. Stars are formed within this medium from cold molecular gas clouds, which collapse due to their gravitational…
It has been a longstanding problem to determine, as far as possible, the characteristic masses of stars in terms of fundamental constants; the almost complete invariance of this mass as a function of the star-forming environment suggests…
Recent observations, as well as theoretical studies, have suggested that stellar cluster formation may depend on local and global environmental properties. In particular, the fraction of stars that form within long-lived bound clusters…
It has been known for more than 30 years that star formation in giant molecular clouds (GMCs) is slow, in the sense that only ~1% of the gas forms stars every free-fall time. This result is entirely independent of any particular model of…
Interstellar turbulence is driven over a wide range of scales by processes including spiral arm instabilities and supernovae, and it affects the rate and morphology of star formation, energy dissipation, and angular momentum transfer in…
The cold interstellar medium (ISM) plays a central role in the galaxy evolution process. It is the reservoir that fuels galaxy growth via star formation, the repository of material formed by these stars, and a sensitive tracer of internal…
Until recently, simulations that modeled entire galaxies were restricted to an isothermal or fixed 2- or 3-phase interstellar medium (ISM). This obscured the full role of the ISM in shaping the observed galactic-scale star formation…
We use a 0.040 < z < 0.085 sample of 37866 star-forming galaxies from the Fourth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to investigate the dependence of gas-phase chemical properties on stellar mass and environment. The local density,…
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…