Letters of Intent received in 2016

LoI 2018-1925
From dense cores to galaxies: star formation in the Local Universe

Topics

Star formation in dense gas
Molecular cloud structure
Clusters and associations near and far
Measuring SFRs and star formation laws in the local universe
Scaling relations in the Milky Way and within nearby galaxies
Global processes affecting star formation
The role of feedback on GMC and galactic scales
GMC formation and evolution
Star formation in galactic nuclei and starbursts
Universality of star formation

Rationale

Understanding star formation is critical for understanding one of the most debated topics in modern astrophysics: galaxy formation and evolution. But understanding star formation requires observations with good spatial resolution and dynamic range, up to now only available for Galactic studies. Indeed, over the past decades significant progress has been made in both observational and theoretical studies of star formation in the local Milky Way. These studies provide the basic foundation for building an understanding of extragalactic star formation. Now a major revolution is about to take place and significantly improve our myopic vision of the star formation process. With the advent of large facilities such as ALMA, JWST, and ELT, resolved observations of star formation will be possible in an increasing number of nearby galaxies, offering not only improved statistics but the large scale perspective difficult to achieve in the Milky Way. Such resolved observations of galaxies offer the potential to investigate the star formation process in widely different environments and in sufficient detail to provide important new constraints for the development of a more general theory of star formation.

Until now studies of galactic and extragalactic star formation have proceeded independently with little overlap due to the vast difference in angular resolutions used and spatial scales probed. With the deployment of facilities such as ALMA, JWST, and ELT this situation is rapidly changing as the new observations are beginning to resolve galaxies in a detail that invites direct comparison with Milky Way studies. The primary goal of our proposed Symposium is to bring together Milky Way star formation expertise, currently enhanced by facilities such as Planck, Herschel, and Gaia, with extragalactic star formation expertise, in the process of benefitting from ALMA, JWST, and ELT, to begin to break the barriers separating these two closely related fields of astronomical inquiry. The concept is to build on the solid foundation of knowledge gained in Milky Way studies to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the physical process of star formation in extragalactic systems, from galactic disks to starbursts.