The New Frontier: Galactic-Scale Star Formation

The New Frontier: Galactic–Scale Star Formation

The arena of investigation of star formation and its scaling laws is slowly, but consistently, shifting from the realm of luminous galaxies to that of faint ones and to sub–galactic regions, as existing and new facilities enable investigators to probe regions of the combined parameter space of surface brightness, wavelength, and angular resolution that were inaccessible until a few years ago. W...

Star Formation and Galactic Evolution

Star Formation Histories of the Galactic Satellites

Late accretion models for formation of the Galactic halo require that many Galactic satellite galaxies have been cannibalised into the halo field. Comparison of the metallicity and age distribution function of stars in the surviving satellites with the apparently exclusively old stars in the field halo can constrain the importance of any such process. We have developed a new objective technique...

The influence of star clusters on galactic disks: new insights on star-formation in galaxies

Stars form in embedded star clusters which play a key role in determining the properties of a galaxy’s stellar population. A large fraction of newly born massive stars are shot out from dynamically unstable embedded-cluster cores spreading them to large distances before they explode. Embedded clusters blow out their gas once the feedback energy from the new stellar population overcomes its bind...

Star Formation Thresholds in Galactic Disks

We report the first results of a detailed study of the star formation law in a sample of 32 nearby spiral galaxies with well-measured rotation curves, HI and H2 (as traced by CO) surface density profiles, and new Hα CCD photometry. In this paper we present an atlas of Hα images and radial surface brightness profiles and describe a surface-density threshold in the star formation law. Prominent b...