Related papers: The Schmidt Law at High Molecular Densities
The relationship between the star formation rate surface density and the molecular gas surface density in galaxies is key to understanding galaxy evolution. To investigate the molecular Kennicutt-Schmidt (K-S) relation and its dependence on…
ALMA Cycle 2 observations of the long wavelength dust emission in 145 star-forming galaxies are used to probe the evolution of star-forming ISM. We also develop the physical basis and empirical calibration (with 72 low-z and z ~ 2 galaxies)…
The Kennicutt-Schmidt law is an empirical relation between the star formation rate surface density ($\Sigma_{SFR}$) and the gas surface density ($\Sigma_{gas}$) in disc galaxies. The relation has a power-law form $\Sigma_{SFR} \propto…
We provide a model for how Kennicutt-Schmidt (KS) laws, which describe the correlation between star formation rate and gas surface or volume density, depend on the molecular line chosen to trace the gas. We show that, for lines that can be…
I review some recent results about the molecular content of galaxies, obtained essentially from the CO lines, but also dense tracers, or the dust continuum emission. New results have been obtained on molecular cloud physics, and their…
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 measure empirical relationships between the local star formation rate (SFR) and properties of the star-forming molecular gas on 1.5 kpc scales across 80 nearby galaxies. These relationships, commonly referred to as "star formation laws,"…
In this paper we investigate scaling relations between star formation rates and molecular gas masses for both local Galactic clouds and a sample of external galaxies. We specifically consider relations between the star formation rates and…
We use observations of the radial profiles of the mass surface density of total, Sigma_g, and molecular, Sigma_H2, gas, rotation velocity and star formation rate surface density, Sigma_sfr, of the molecular dominated regions of 12 disk…
The Kennicutt-Schmidt (KS) relationship between the surface density of the star formation rate (SFR) and the gas surface density has three distinct power laws that may result from one model in which gas collapses at a fixed fraction of the…
We use new ALMA observations to investigate the connection between dense gas fraction, star formation rate, and local environment across the inner region of four local galaxies showing a wide range of molecular gas depletion times. We map…
At the highest stellar masses (log(\mstar) $\gtrsim$ 11.5 \msun), only a small fraction of galaxies are disk-like and actively star-forming objects. These so-called `super spirals' are ideal objects to better understand how galaxy evolution…
In the second work of this series, we analyse the connection between the availability of gas and the position of a region with respect to the spatially resolved main sequence (MS) relation. Following the procedure presented in Paper I we…
This study investigated the relation between the surface density of star formation rate (SFR) ($\Sigma_{\mathrm{SFR}}$), stellar mass ($\Sigma_{M_{\ast}}$), and molecular gas mass ($\Sigma_{M_\mathrm{mol}}$) on nearly 1 kpc scales averaged…
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 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…
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…
We use a new method to trace backwards the star formation history of the Milky Way disk, using a sample of M dwarfs in the solar neighbourhood which is representative for the entire solar circle. M stars are used because they show H_alpha…
We present a high spatial resolution study, on scales of $\sim$100pc, of the relationship between star-formation rate (SFR) and gas content within Local Group galaxy M33. Combining deep SCUBA-2 observations with archival GALEX, SDSS, WISE,…
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…