Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2012
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21920803h&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #208.03
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We investigate the relation between star formation rate (SFR) and gas surface densities in Galactic star forming regions and integral field unit (IFU) spatially resolved regions in nearby interacting/starburst galaxies. Our Galactic study uses a sample of 20 molecular clouds from the Spitzer c2d and Gould's Belt surveys. These data allow us to probe the low mass star formation regime that is essentially invisible to tracers (such as H-alpha emission) used to establish extragalactic relations (eg., Schmidt-Kennicutt relation). We find Galactic clouds above a threshold of 129 Msun/pc2 lie on a linear relation above extragalactic relations. Our extragalactic IFU survey is the VIRUS-P Investigation of the eXtreme ENvironments of Starbursts (VIXENS) which includes 15 nearby interacting/starburst galaxies that span a range of interaction phases: from close pairs to late stage mergers. The main goal of VIXENS is to investigate the Schmidt-Kennicutt relation on spatial scales of 0.1-0.9 kpc and test theoretical predictions at high SFR and gas surface densities in starburst galaxies. If a starburst CO-to-H2 conversion factor is used, we find sub-kpc scale starburst regions lie above extragalactic relations, overlapping with global measurements of high-z mergers as well as Galactic star forming regions. The overlap with Galactic star forming regions suggests that the bulk of gas in mergers is efficiently forming stars. These unique data sets allow us to compare SFR-gas surface density relations from Galactic clouds to extreme starbursts on spatially resolved scales for the first time.
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