Related papers: Evolution of giant molecular clouds across cosmic …
Understanding mass, size, and surface mass density of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in galaxies is key to insights into star formation processes. We analyze these in M33 using Herschel dust and archival IRAM 30m telescope data, compared to…
The evolution of molecular clouds in galactic centres is thought to differ from that in galactic discs due to a significant influence of the external gravitational potential. We present a set of numerical simulations of molecular clouds…
In this work, we trace the complete life cycle of individual GMCs in high-resolution Milky Way-mass galaxy simulations to determine how different stellar feedback mechanisms and galactic-scale processes govern cloud lifetimes, mass…
The processes of star formation and feedback, regulating the cycle of matter between gas and stars on the scales of giant molecular clouds (GMCs; $\sim$100pc), play a major role in governing galaxy evolution. Measuring the time-scales of…
Contemporary galactic star formation occurs predominantly within gravitationally unstable, cold, dense molecular gas within supersonic, turbulent, magnetized giant molecular clouds (GMCs). Significantly, because the chemical evolution…
Using hydrodynamical simulations of a Milky Way-like galaxy, reaching 4.6 pc resolution, we study how the choice of star formation criteria impacts both galactic and Giant Molecular Clouds (GMC) scales. We find that using a turbulent,…
We present a large suite of MHD simulations of turbulent, star-forming giant molecular clouds(GMCs) with stellar feedback, extending previous work by simulating 10 different random realizations for each point in the parameter space of cloud…
Stars are forming in our galaxy at a rate of between 1 and 4 solar masses of stars per year. In contrast to elliptical galaxies, which are largely devoid of star formation, star formation is still going on in spiral galaxies because of…
The formation of stars is inextricably linked to the structure of their parental molecular clouds. Here we take a number of nearby giant molecular clouds (GMCs) and analyse their column density and mass distributions. This investigation is…
It remains a major challenge to derive a theory of cloud-scale ($\lesssim100$ pc) star formation and feedback, describing how galaxies convert gas into stars as a function of the galactic environment. Progress has been hampered by a lack of…
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 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)…
Massive stars are key players in the evolution of galaxies, yet their formation pathway remains unclear. In this work, we use data from several galaxy-wide surveys to build an unbiased dataset of ~700 massive young stellar objects (MYSOs),…
Observations show that molecular gas in spiral galaxies is organized into a network of interconnected systems through the gravitational coupling of multi-scale hub-filament structures. Building on this picture, we model molecular gas in the…
We study the formation of giant dense cloud complexes and of stars within them by means of SPH numerical simulations of the mildly supersonic collision of gas streams (``inflows'') in the warm neutral medium (WNM). The resulting…
We use high spatial resolution observations of CO to systematically measure the resolved size-line width, luminosity-line width, luminosity-size, and the mass-luminosity relations of Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs) in a variety of…
We employ the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE-2) physics model to study how the properties of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) evolve during galaxy mergers. We conduct a pixel-by-pixel analysis of molecular gas properties in both the…
We present the first comparative study of extragalactic GMCs using complete data sets for entire galaxies and a uniform set of reduction and analysis techniques. We present results based on CO observations for the LMC, SMC, M33, M31, IC10…
The cold molecular gas in contemporary galaxies is structured in discrete cloud complexes. These giant molecular clouds (GMCs), with $10^4$-$10^7$ solar masses and radii of 5-100 parsecs, are the seeds of star formation. Highlighting the…
We investigate the formation and evolution of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) by the collision of convergent warm neutral medium (WNM) streams in the interstellar medium, in the presence of magnetic fields and ambipolar diffusion (AD),…