A law for star formation in galaxies

Abstract

We study the galactic-scale triggering of star formation. We find that the largest mass-scale not stabilized by rotation, a well defined quantity in a rotating system and with clear dynamical meaning, strongly correlates with the star formation rate in a wide range of galaxies. We find that this relation can be understood in terms of self-regulation towards marginal Toomre stability and the amount of turbulence allowed to sustain the system in this self-regulated quasi-stationary state. We test such an interpretation by computing the predicted star formation rates for a galactic interstellar medium characterized by lognormal probability distribution function and find good agreement with the observed relation.

13 pages, 2 figures, Accepted in ApJ

References in corpus (5)

• The Density Probability Distribution in Compressible Isothermal Turbulence: Solenoidal versus Compressive Forcing
• Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Disk Galaxy Formation: the Magnetization of The Cold and Warm Medium
• Stability of Galactic Gas Disks and the Formation of Massive Clusters
• The census of nuclear activity of late-type galaxies in the Virgo cluster
• CO(1-0), CO(2-1) and Neutral Gas in NGC 6946: Molecular Gas in a Late-Type, Gas Rich, Spiral Galaxy

Cited by in corpus (11)

• The Evolution of the Star-forming Interstellar Medium across Cosmic Time
• Evolution of the Fraction of Clumpy Galaxies at 0.2<z<1.0 in the COSMOS field
• The Lesser Role of Shear in Star Formation: Insight from the Galactic Ring Survey
• Feedback Regulated Star Formation: Implications for the Kennicutt-Schmidt Law
• Near-infrared adaptive optics imaging of infrared luminous galaxies: the brightest cluster magnitude - star formation rate relation
• The K-band luminosity functions of super star clusters in luminous infrared galaxies, their slopes, and the effects of blending
• Observational Support for Massive Black Hole Formation Driven by Runaway Stellar Collisions in Galactic Nuclei
• The extended law of star formation: the combined role of gas and stars
• The Interstellar Medium and Star Formation in Local Galaxies: Variations of the Star Formation Law in Simulations
• Gravitational Fragmentation in Galaxy Mergers: A Stability Criteria
• On the Functional Form of the Universal Star Formation Law