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(ABBREVIATED) Understanding the formation of stars in galaxies is central to much of modern astrophysics. In this review the relation between interstellar turbulence and star formation is discussed. Supersonic turbulence can provide support…
We present an analysis of the atomic hydrogen and stellar properties of 38 late-type galaxies in the local Universe covering a wide range of HI mass-to-light ratios (M_HI/L_B), stellar luminosities, and surface brightnesses. From these data…
The relations between star formation and properties of molecular clouds are studied based on a sample of star forming regions in the Galactic Plane. Sources were selected by having radio recombination lines to provide identification of…
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…
Self-regulation of star formation in disks is controlled by two dimensionless parameters: the Toomre parameter for gravitational instability and the porosity of the interstellar medium to supernova remnant-heated gas. An interplay between…
How mass assembly occurs in galaxies and which process(es) contribute to this activity are among the most highly debated questions in galaxy formation theories. This has motivated our survey MASSIV of 0.9<z<1.9 star-forming galaxies…
Using a suite of isolated $L_\star$ galaxy simulations, we show that global depletion times and star-forming gas mass fractions in simulated galaxies exhibit systematic and well-defined trends as a function of the local star formation…
We investigate the enhancement of star formation efficiency in galaxy interactions and mergers, by numerical simulations of several hundred galaxy collisions. All morphological types along the Hubble sequence are considered in the initial…
Faber-Jackson and Tully-Fisher scaling relations for elliptical and spiral galaxy samples up to z=1 provide evidence for a differential behaviour of galaxy evolution with mass. In compliance with the downsizing scenario, the stellar…
Star formation history shows a gradual decline since the last 8-9 Gyr (z=1). The bulk of present-day stellar mass and metal content was formed at redshifts lower than 2-3, which is consistent with a hierarchical scenario of galaxy…
Massive galaxies, such as nearby ellipticals, have relatively low number densities, yet they host the majority of the stellar mass in the universe. Understanding their origin is a central problem of galaxy formation. Age dating of stellar…
Current models of galaxy evolution suggest that feedback from active galactic nuclei is needed to explain the high-luminosity cutoff in the galaxy luminosity function. Exactly how an AGN outflow couples with the ambient medium and…
We constrain the rate of gas inflow into and outflow from a main-sequence star-forming galaxy at z~1.4 by fitting a simple analytic model for the chemical evolution in a galaxy to the observational data of the stellar mass, metallicity, and…
We extend a chemical evolution model relating galaxy stellar mass and gas-phase oxygen abundance (the mass-metallicity relation) to explicitly consider the mass-dependence of galaxy gas fractions and outflows. Using empirically derived…
Star clusters are observed to form in a highly compact state and with low star-formation efficiencies, and only 10 per cent of all clusters appear to survive to middle- and old-dynamical age. If the residual gas is expelled on a dynamical…
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…
We examine the importance of secular stellar mass loss for fueling ongoing star formation in disk galaxies during the late stages of their evolution. For a galaxy of a given stellar mass, we calculate the total mass loss rate of its entire…
We propose a simple analytic model to understand when star formation is time-steady versus bursty in galaxies. Recent models explain the observed Kennicutt-Schmidt relation between star formation rate and gas surface densities in galaxies…
Galaxy-galaxy interactions and large scale galaxy bars are usually considered as the two main mechanisms for driving gas to the centres of galaxies. By using large samples of galaxy pairs and visually classified bars from the Sloan Digital…
Stellar chemical element ratios have well-defined systematic trends as a function of abundance, with an excellent correlation of these trends with stellar populations defined kinematically. This is remarkable, and has significant…