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What regulates the star formation in nearby late type galaxies?
The spatially resolved correlations between stellar mass, star formation rate (SFR) and molecular gas (H2) surface densities provide powerful insights into the physical processes regulating the formation of stars, as they are a direct imprint of these regulating mechanisms. I use data from the PHANGS-ALMA and PHANGS-MUSE surveys to explore classic star-forming scaling relations at a cloud-scale resolution in eighteen galaxies, their scatter, galaxy-to-galaxy variations and galactic environment-driven variations.
I find similar correlations at this cloud scale to earlier integrated/kpc-scale measurements, albeit with considerably increased scatter. The resolved Kennicutt-Schmidt relation (rKS) exhibits the lowest galaxy-to-galaxy variations, implying that the formation of stars is mainly regulated by the amount of molecular gas available to form stars.
Are different galactic environments actually different?
For the first time – thanks to the high resolution of the PHANGS observations - we can measure these scaling relations across different galactic environments (namely spiral arms, disks, bars, centers, and rings). The top row of panels of the figure shows how the resolved scaling relations vary between different galactic environments. Global trends are set mostly by the galactic disks (which contribute the majority of the area of the galaxy), while bars and spiral arms usually lie below and above the main trends, respectively. The bottom panels show the vertical offset from the main trend (y-axis) as a function of the measured slope (x-axis) measured for each environment.
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