The Molecular Gas Distribution and Schmidt Law in M33

By M. Heyer, E. Corbelli, S. Schneider, J. Young. 2003

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The relationship between the star formation rate and surface density of neutral gas within the disk of M33 is examined with new imaging observations of 12CO J = 1-0 emission gathered with the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory (FCRAO) 14 m telescope and IRAS HiRes images of the 60 and 100 μm emission. The Schmidt law, ΣSFR ~ Σ, is constructed using radial profiles of the H I 21 cm, CO, and far-infrared emission. We identify a strong correlation between the star formation rate and molecular gas surface density. This suggests that the condensation of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) is the limiting step to star formation within the M33 disk. The corresponding molecular Schmidt index, nmol, is 1.36 ± 0.08. The star formation rate has a steep dependence on total mass gas surface density, (Σ + Σ), owing to the shallow radial profile of the atomic gas that dominates the total gas surface density for most radii. The disk pressure of the gas is shown to play a prominent role in regulating the molecular gas fraction in M33.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc3f38c71d9e382e85bfccea52fab739dfa46c02

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Citations in the corpus

A MOLECULAR STAR FORMATION LAW IN THE ATOMIC-GAS-DOMINATED REGIME IN NEARBY GALAXIES (2011, background): “…variations of the fraction of gas in the molecular phase as a function of galactocentric radius, total gas surface density, stellar surface density, disk orbital time, and interstellar pressure (Wong & Blitz 2002; Heyer et al. 2004; Blitz & Rosolowsky 2006; Leroy et al. 2008; Wong et al. 2009).”
Molecular and atomic gas in the Local Group galaxy M 33 (2010, methodology): “Engargiola et al. (2003) observed the whole of the inner disk (up to about 5kpc along the major axis) with the BIMA array at 13′′ resolution; Heyer et al. (2004) ob- served the inner disk and a small major axis strip at 50” res- olution with FCRAO; Rosolowsky et al. (2007) combined…”
Star Formation in the Milky Way and Nearby Galaxies (2012, background): “…of the star formation law derived in this way have been carried out by numerous authors (e.g., Kennicutt 1989; Martin & Kennicutt 2001; Wong & Blitz 2002; Boissier et al. 2003; Heyer et al. 2004; Komugi et al. 2005; Schuster et al. 2007; Leroy et al. 2008; Schruba et al. 2011; Gratier et al. 2010).”
The Relationship between Molecular Gas Tracers and Kennicutt-Schmidt Laws (2007, background): “…CO(1 → 0) observations are possible, star formation is more closely coupled with gas traced by CO(1 → 0) than with atomic gas (Wong & Blitz 2002; Heyer et al. 2004; Komugi et al. 2005; Kennicutt et al. 2007) Second, Gao & Solomon (2004a,b) find that there is a Electronic address:…”
On the relation between the Schmidt and Kennicutt-Schmidt star formation laws and its implications for numerical simulations (2007, background): “The KS law depends on the total gas surface density, but several studies have claimed that the exponent n ≈ 1.4 is only valid for molecular gas and that including atomic gas results in larger exponents (e.g. Wong & Blitz 2002; Heyer et al. 2004).”
Radial Variation of Attenuation and Star Formation in the Largest Late-Type Disks Observed with GALEX (2006, unknown): “…(1990a); 14 Carignan & Puche (1990b) ; 15 Casertano & van Gorkom (1991) ; 16 Cayatte et al. (1994) ; 17 Corbelli (2003) ; 18 Dame et al. (1993) ; 19 Heyer et al. (2004) ; 20 Hunter et al. (2001) ; 21 Jackson et al. (2004) ; 22 Kenney & Young (1988) ; 23 Kenney et al. (1991) ; 24 Lake & Skillman…”
THE STAR FORMATION RATE AND GAS SURFACE DENSITY RELATION IN THE MILKY WAY: IMPLICATIONS FOR EXTRAGALACTIC STUDIES (2010, methodology): “…relations on either global scales (Kennicutt 1989, 1998b) or using either radial (Martin & Kennicutt 2001; Wong & Blitz 2002; Boissier et al. 2003; Heyer et al. 2004; Komugi et al. 2005; Schuster et al. 2007) or point–by– point measurements (Kuno et al. 1995; Zhang et al. 2001) that find values…”
THE STAR FORMATION LAW IN NEARBY GALAXIES ON SUB-KPC SCALES (2008, unknown): “Heyer et al. (2004) found N = 3.3 ± 0.1 for M33.”
Implementing molecular hydrogen in hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation (2012, background): “…the SFR toH2 at various spatial scales and across a wide sample of galaxies also found that the SFR correlates most strongly withH2 (Rownd & Young 1999; Murgia et al. 2002; Heyer et al. 2004; Gao & Solomon 2004; Kennicutt et al. 2007; Blanc et al. 2009; Warren et al. 2010; Bigiel et al. 2010).”
Molecular Hydrogen and Global Star Formation Relations in Galaxies (2007, methodology): “While the slope of the spatially-resolved molecular gas SK relation is consistently measured to benmol ≈ 1.4 in the same systems, with a two-sigma variation ofnmol ∼ 1.2− 1.7 (Wong & Blitz 2002; Boissier et al. 2003; Heyer et al. 2004; Boissier et al. 2007; Kennicutt et al. 2007).”
THE IMPACT OF INTERACTIONS, BARS, BULGES, AND ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI ON STAR FORMATION EFFICIENCY IN LOCAL MASSIVE GALAXIES (2012, background): “First, there is evidence that the molecular star formation law extends even in the HIdominated outer regions of normal star-forming discs (e.g. Heyer et al. 2004; Schruba et al. 2011).”
THE CO-TO-H2 CONVERSION FACTOR FROM INFRARED DUST EMISSION ACROSS THE LOCAL GROUP (2011, methodology): “For M 33, we take CO data from Rosolowsky et al. (2007), which combines BIMA (Engargiola et al. 2003) and FCRAO data (Heyer et al. 2004).”
The Role of Pressure in GMC Formation II: The H2-Pressure Relation (2006, methodology): “We generated a molecular gas map from a masked integratedintensity map from the FCRAO 14-m survey of the galaxy (Heyer et al. 2004).”
THE SCALE DEPENDENCE OF THE MOLECULAR GAS DEPLETION TIME IN M33 (2010, methodology): “Rosolowsky et al. (2007) showed that this combined cube recovers the flux of the Heyer et al. (2004) FCRAO data.”
Theory of Star Formation (2007, methodology): “Since star formation tends to deplete the gas in any region until Q is near the critical value Qcrit ≃ 1.5 (theory: Quirk, 1972; observation: Martin & Kennicutt, 2001; Wong & Blitz, 2002; Murgia et al., 2002; Boissier et al., 2003), this yields the “orbital time” form of the KS law (including the no”
Star Formation in NGC 5194 (M51a). II. The Spatially Resolved Star Formation Law (2007, result): “However our result is consistent with other spatially-resolved measurements of nearby galaxies, based on either point-by-point measurements of azimuthally averaged radial profiles of SFR and gas surface densities (Kennicutt 1989, Wong & Blitz 2002, Heyer et al. 2004, Komugi et al. 2005).”
A WIDE-FIELD HIGH-RESOLUTION H i MOSAIC OF MESSIER 31. I. OPAQUE ATOMIC GAS AND STAR FORMATION RATE DENSITY (2009, methodology): “The molecular-only plots are overplotted both the relation of K07 with slope 1.37, a value which has also been found by Heyer et al. (2004) in M33, as well as a line with unit slope corresponding to a constant gas depletion time-scale, as advocated by Wong & Blitz (2002), (hereafter WB02).”
A CONSTANT MOLECULAR GAS DEPLETION TIME IN NEARBY DISK GALAXIES (2011, background): “Many of these focus on single galaxies (e.g., Heyer et al. 2004; Kennicutt et al. 2007; Schuster et al. 2007; Blanc et al. 2009; Verley et al. 2010; Rahman et al. 2010) or a small sample (e.g., Wong & Blitz 2002; Leroy et al. 2008; Bigiel et al. 2008; Wilson et al. 2009; Warren et al. 2010).”