Propagation of star formation at sub-kiloparsec scales
arXiv:1907.02934 · doi:10.1093/mnras/stz1881
Abstract
We study the propagation of star formation based on the investigation of the separation of young star clusters from HII regions nearest to them. The relation between the separation and U-B colour index (or age) of a star cluster was found. The average age of star clusters increases with the separation as the 1.0-1.2 power in the separation range from 40 to 200 pc and as the 0.4-0.9 power in the range of 100-500 pc in the galaxies with symmetric morphology. The galaxies with distorted asymmetric disc structure show more complex and steeper (power >1.2 at separations from 40 to 500 pc) dependence between the age and the separation. Our results confirm the findings of previous studies on the dominant role of turbulence in propagation of the star formation process on spatial scales up to 500 pc and on time scales up to 300 Myr. On a smaller scale (=<100 pc), other physical processes, such as stellar winds and supernova explosions, play an important role along with turbulence. On the scale of stellar associations (100-200 pc and smaller), the velocity of star formation propagation is almost constant and it has a typical value of a few km/s.
10 pages, 13 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS
References in corpus (8)
- An H-alpha Imaging Survey of Galaxies in the Local 11 Mpc Volume
- Dawes Review 4: Spiral Structures in Disc Galaxies
- Using H-alpha Morphology and Surface Brightness Fluctuations to Age-Date Star Clusters in M83
- The Spatial Relation between Young Star Clusters and Molecular Clouds in M 51 with LEGUS
- Hierarchical Star Formation in Nearby LEGUS Galaxies
- Hierarchical star formation in the Milky Way disk
- Hierarchical Star Formation in Turbulent Media: Evidence from Young Star Clusters
- Robust Cross-correlation-based Measurement of Clump Sizes in Galaxies