http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03454
We study the star formation process at galactic scales and the role of rotation through numerical simulations of spiral and starburst galaxies using the Adaptive Mesh Refinement code Enzo. Most part of this work is focused on the study of three integrated star formation laws found in the literature: the Kennicutt-Schmidt and Silk-Elmegreen laws, and the dimensionally homogeneous equation proposed by Escala (2015) $\Sigma_{\rm SFR} \propto \sqrt{G/L}\Sigma_{\rm gas}^{1.5}$. We show that using the relation formulated by Escala (2015) we get the correct effects of the integration along the line-of-sight and find a unique regime of star formation for both kind of galaxies, suppressing the bi-modality of the Kennicutt-Schmidt law. We find that the efficiencies displayed by our simulations are anti-correlated with the angular velocity of the disk $\Omega$ for the three laws studied. Finally we show that the dimensionless efficiency of star formation is well represented by a exponentially decreasing function of $-1.9\Omega t_{\rm ff}^{\rm ini}$, where $\Omega$ is the orbital frequency and $t_{\rm ff}^{\rm ini}$ is the initial free-fall time, leading to a unique galactic star formation law reducing the scatter of the bi-modal Kennicutt-Schmidt, Silk-Elmegreen and Escala (2015) relations by 43\%, 43\% and 35\% respectively
J. Utreras, F. Becerra and A. Escala
Tue, 14 Jun 16
2/67
Comments: Submitted to ApJ, 19 pages, 15 figures
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