Related papers: Determining Star Formation Thresholds from Observa…
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…
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…
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…
We explore various instability models for the onset of star formation in irregular galaxies. Critical gas densities are calculated for gravitational instabilities with a thin, pure-gas disk, and with a thick disk composed of gas and a…
We estimate the star formation efficiency per gravitational free fall time, $\epsilon_{\rm ff}$, from observations of nearby galaxies with resolution matched to the typical size of a Giant Molecular Cloud. This quantity, $\epsilon_{\rm…
We explore the relationship between stellar surface density and gas surface density (the star-gas or S-G correlation) in a 20,000 M$_{\odot}$ simulation from the STAR FORmation in Gaseous Environments (STARFORGE) Project. We create…
In this paper, we investigate the extent to which observations of molecular clouds can correctly identify and measure star-forming clumps. We produced a synthetic column density map and a synthetic spectral-line data cube from the simulated…
Although the basic physics of star formation is classical, numerical simulations have yielded essential insights into how stars form. They show that star formation is a highly nonuniform runaway process characterized by the emergence of…
Stars in galaxies form in giant molecular clouds that coalesce when the atomic hydrogen is converted into molecules. There are currently two dominant models for what property of the galactic disk determines its molecular fraction: either…
We use a suite of 3D simulations of star-forming molecular clouds, with and without stellar feedback, magnetic fields, and driven turbulence, to study the compression and expansion rates of the gas as functions of density. We show that,…
Observations suggest that star formation occurs in only one or two crossing times for a range of scales spanning a factor of 1000. These observations include (1) measurements of embedded cluster ages in comparison with the cloud core…
I review observational studies of the large-scale star formation process in nearby galaxies. A wealth of new multi-wavelength data provide an unprecedented view on the interplay of the interstellar medium and (young) stellar populations on…
Through synthetic observations of a hydrodynamical simulation of an evolving star-forming region, we assess how the choice of observational techniques affects the measurements of properties which trace star formation. Testing and…
(Abridged) The question of how most stars in the Universe form remains open. While star formation predominantly occurs in young massive clusters, the current framework focuses on isolated star formation. One way to access the bulk of…
Using a quantitative model for bipolar outflows driven by hydromagnetic protostellar winds, we calculate the efficiency of star formation assuming that available gas is either converted into stars or ejected in outflows. We estimate the…
We performed 3-dimensional N-body/SPH simulations to study how mass resolution and other model parameters such as the star formation efficiency parameter, C* and the threshold density, nth affect structures of the galactic gaseous/stellar…
The cloud-scale physics of star formation and feedback represent the main uncertainty in galaxy formation studies. Progress is hampered by the limited empirical constraints outside the restricted environment of the Local Group. In…
Observations of cold molecular gas reservoirs are critical for understanding the shutdown of star formation in massive galaxies. While dust continuum is an efficient and affordable tracer, this method relies upon the assumption of a…
Empirical star formation laws from the last 20 years are reviewed with a comparison to simulations. The current form in main galaxy disks has a linear relationship between the star formation rate per unit area and the molecular cloud mass…
We test some ideas for star formation relations against data on local molecular clouds. On a cloud by cloud basis, the relation between the surface density of star formation rate and surface density of gas divided by a free-fall time,…