STAR FORMATION RELATIONS IN NEARBY MOLECULAR CLOUDS

By N. Evans II, A. Heiderman, N. Vutisalchavakul. 2014

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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, calculated from the mean cloud density, shows no significant correlation. If a crossing time is substituted for the free-fall time, there is even less correlation. Within a cloud, the star formation rate volume and surface densities increase rapidly with the corresponding gas densities, faster than predicted by models using the free-fall time defined from the local density. A model in which the star formation rate depends linearly on the mass of gas above a visual extinction of 8 mag describes the data on these clouds, with very low dispersion. The data on regions of very massive star formation, with improved star formation rates based on free–free emission from ionized gas, also agree with this linear relation.

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Citations in the corpus

Dark matter cores all the way down (2015, methodology): “…models, we adopt a star formation efficiency per free fall time ff = 0.1 motivated by observations of local GMCs (Lada et al. 2010; Murray 2011; Evans et al. 2014), as well as recent numerical work (Hopkins et al. 2014; Agertz & Kravtsov 2015a) demonstrating how the interplay between local…”
A census of dense cores in the Aquila cloud complex: SPIRE/PACS observations from the Herschel Gould Belt survey (2015, background): “12) connect very well with recent near-/midinfrared studies of the star formation rate (SFR) as a function of gas surface density in nearby molecular clouds (e.g., Heiderman et al. 2010; Lada et al. 2010, 2012; Evans et al. 2014).”
Physical Processes in the Interstellar Medium (2014, background): “…et al., 1998; Johnstone et al., 2004; Lada et al., 2010) or simply a steep dependence of the star formation rate on the column density (Hatchell et al., 2005; Enoch et al., 2008; Heiderman et al., 2010; Gutermuth et al., 2011; Burkert & Hartmann, 2013; Lada et al., 2013; Evans et al., 2014).”
YOUNG STELLAR OBJECTS IN THE GOULD BELT (2015, background): “…rates and thresholds (Heiderman et al. 2010), the luminosities of protostars (Dunham et al. 2013), relationships between gas and star formation (Evans et al. 2014), and the physical nature of empirically defined classes of young stars (Heiderman & Evans 2015), this list itself has not yet…”
ON THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN STAR FORMATION AND FEEDBACK IN GALAXY FORMATION SIMULATIONS (2014, methodology): “This is illustrated in Figure 2, which shows values of ff,GMC estimated for samples of individual GMCs in the Milky Way by Murray et al. (2011) and Evans et al. (2014) as a function of GMC mass.”
The big problems in star formation: The star formation rate, stellar clustering, and the initial mass function (2014, methodology): “The star formation rate per unit mass within a given cloud also appears to be strongly correlated with the amount of gas it possesses above some threshold volume or column density (Heiderman et al. 2010; Lada et al. 2010, 2012; Evans et al. 2014).”