Star formation scaling-laws at Parsecs Scale

In force date
Investigator
Almudena
Prieto Escudero
Financial institution
Amount granted to the IAC Consortium
70.000 €
Description

The project focuses on the analysis of the scaling-laws of star forming regions in the circumnuclear zone -central kpc- of a sample of six nearby galaxies selected with different star formation morphology (disk, ring or nuclear) and host galaxy type (Sa to EO). The project relies on an unique high-angular resolution dataset that resolves - in the UV to infrared range - the star forming regions in their individual components, the star clusters at a few parsec scales. The dataset resorts to HST imaging in the UV - Optical and ESO - NaCo, SINFONI and VISIR adaptive optics imaging in the Infrared to extract the 0.3 um - 20 um spectral energy distribution of individual clusters to infer on their individual ages, mass, dust content and ionization stage. This work has already been produced in our group. An essential step in the project will be the integration of ALMA data of the star forming regions, already available in the scientific archive for most of the galaxies in the sample. ALMA data in CO and HCN lines and in continuum will serve us to identify the molecular clouds that are associated with the proto-clusters already identified in the UV - IR analysis in the galaxy sample. The specific goals in the proposal - achievable in a 15 months period of a dedicated postdoc with spectroscopy data processing experience are 1) to identify, extract and re-process the high resolution ALMA data of the sample; 2) to cross-correlate the produced molecular line maps with the star forming cocoons resolved at scales of 10 pc in our UV to IR dataset; 3) to measure the molecular content of each cloud and compare with the star formation rate derived from our UV - IR analysis.

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