Speaker
Jose Utreras
(Universidad de Chile)
Description
Knowing how efficiently stars are formed in galaxies is fundamental to understand the
evolution of our universe. Unfortunately, several physical processes governing star
formation are dynamically coupled in the non-linear regime, complicating the study of
their independent effects. Here we use numerical experiments to study the effects of
galactic rotation, employing the Adaptive Mesh Refinement code Enzo. By studying the
Kennicutt-Schmidt and Silk-Elmegreen laws, and the dimensionally homogeneous equation
proposed by Escala (2015) we find that galactic rotation decreases the efficiency of
star formation in disk galaxies. We find that the relation formulated by Escala
(2015) gets the correct effects of the concentration along the line-of-sight,
suppressing the bi-modality of the Kennicutt-Schmidt law. Finally we show that the
dimensionless efficiency of star formation is well represented by a exponentially
decreasing function of Ωτ, where Ω is the orbital frequency and τ is the initial
free-fall time, leading to a unique galactic star formation law.
Primary author
Jose Utreras
(Universidad de Chile)
Co-authors
Andrés Escala
(Universidad de Chile)
Fernando Becerra
(Harvard University)
