Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 735, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/735/1/56
Keywords
galaxies: formation; galaxies: ISM; galaxies: star formation; instabilities
Categories
Funding
- Center of Excellence in Astrophysics and Associated Technologies [PFB 06]
- FONDECYT [11090216]
- Comite Mixto ESO-Chile
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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 toward 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 a lognormal probability distribution function and find good agreement with the observed relation.
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