A multi-scale study of the star formation law in nearby galaxies
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Date
2020
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of the Western Cape
Abstract
This research aimed to evaluate the effects of changing length-scales on the star formation
laws and star formation efficiencies for our selected sample of galaxies. We have combined
high-resolution Hi data from The Hi Nearby Galaxy Survey, CO data from HERA CO–Line
Extragalactic Survey and the Nobeyama CO Atlas of Nearby Spiral Galaxies and 12 𝜇m data
from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer of a sample of five nearby galaxies to study the
relationship between star formation rate surface density, ΣSFR, and gas surface density, Σgas,
at various length-scales. In order to probe the star formation law of each galaxy, all image
sets were placed on common astrometric grids and evaluated on a pixel-by-pixel basis over a
range of sub-kpc length-scales. We investigated whether the star formation law changes with
length-scales and found that as resolution becomes coarser, the Kennicutt Schmidt power-law
index decreases for the correlation between ΣSFR and ΣH2 . Our results show that the index values
are close to unity but are not consistent with it.
Description
>Magister Scientiae - MSc
Keywords
Star formation, Law, Galaxies, Star formation efficiencies