Related papers: Gravitational instability and star formation in di…
We study the global star formation law - the relation between the gas and star formation rate (SFR) in a sample of 130 local galaxies with infrared (IR) luminosities spanning over three orders of magnitude (10^9-10^12 Lsun), which includes…
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…
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…
We present the results of a numerical simulation in which star formation proceeds from an initially unbound molecular cloud core. The turbulent motions, which dominate the dynamics, dissipate in shocks leaving a quiescent region which…
Stars form when filaments and dense cores in molecular clouds fragment and collapse due to self-gravity. In the most basic analyses of gravitational stability, the competition between self-gravity and thermal pressure sets the critical…
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) describes the distribution in stellar masses produced from a burst of star formation. For more than fifty years, the implicit assumption underpinning most areas of research involving the IMF has been…
In this work we present an analysis of the behaviour of galaxies in a four-dimensional parameter space defined by stellar mass, metallicity, star formation rate, and molecular gas mass. We analyse a combined sample of 227 galaxies, which…
We compute chemical evolution models to constrain the mode and the history of star formation in starburst galaxies as a whole, i.e. over a large range of mass and metallicity. To this end, we investigate the origin of the dispersion…
The majority of galaxies with current star-formation rates (SFRs), SFRo >= 10^-3 Msun/yr, in the Local Cosmological Volume where observations should be reliable, have the property that their observed SFRo is larger than their average star…
Over the past 10 Gyr, star-forming galaxies have changed dramatically, from clumpy and gas rich, to rather quiescent stellar-dominated disks with specific star formation rates lower by factors of a few tens. We present a general theoretical…
We examine the HI-based star formation efficiency (SFE_HI), the ratio of star formation rate to the atomic Hydrogen (HI) mass, in the context of a constant stability star-forming disk model. Our observations of HI-selected galaxies show SFE…
We review current understanding of star formation, outlining an overall theoretical framework and the observations that motivate it. A conception of star formation has emerged in which turbulence plays a dual role, both creating…
We present a sub-grid model for star formation in galaxy simulations, incorporating molecular hydrogen ($\mathrm{H}_2$) production via dust grain condensation and its destruction through star formation and photodissociation. Implemented…
In this paper we investigate the level of star formation activity within nearby molecular clouds. We employ a uniform set of infrared extinction maps to provide accurate assessments of cloud mass and structure and compare these with…
We investigate how a protoplanetary disc's susceptibility to gravitational instabilities and fragmentation depends on the mass of its host star. We use 1D disc models in conjunction with 3D SPH simulations to determine the critical…
We compare measurements of star formation efficiency to cloud-scale gas properties across PHANGS-ALMA. Dividing 67 galaxies into 1.5 kpc scale regions, we calculate the molecular gas depletion time, tau_dep= Sigma_mol/Sigma_SFR, and the…
We discuss the occurrence of subcritical star formation in the outskirts of some galactic discs and across LSB galaxies, contrary to the picture that star formation happens only when the gas surface density is above a critical threshold…
Understanding the star formation process is central to much of modern astrophysics. For several decades it has been thought that stellar birth is primarily controlled by the interplay between gravity and magnetostatic support, modulated by…
The correlation between [Mg/Fe] and galaxy mass found in elliptical galaxies sets a strong constraint on the duration of star formation. Furthermore, the colour-magnitude relation restricts the range of ages and metallicities of the stellar…
Pressure-regulated star formation is a simple variant on the usual supernova-regulated star formation efficiency that controls the global star formation rate as a function of cold gas content in star-forming galaxies, and accounts for the…