| Name: ALPHESUNNY SARKAR |
| Affiliation: PRESIDENCY UNIVERSITY, KOLKATA |
| Conference ID: ASI2026_198 |
| Title: Cloud Scale Star Formation and Gas Scaling Relations in the Milky Way |
| Abstract Type: Poster |
| Abstract Category: Stars, Interstellar Medium, and Astrochemistry in Milky Way |
| Author(s) and Co-Author(s) with Affiliation: ALPHESUNNY SARKAR(Presidency University, Kolkata - 700073, India), TAPAS BAUG(S. N. Bose National Centre For Basic Sciences, Kolkata - 700106, India), ARIFUL HOQUE(S. N. Bose National Centre For Basic Sciences, Kolkata - 700106, India), SUCHETANA CHATTERJEE(Presidency University, Kolkata - 700073, India) |
| Abstract: We investigate the variation of star-formation properties at the cloud scale within the Milky Way using a sample of 45 molecular clouds in the inner Galactic plane spanning a wide distance range of 1.1-14.1 kpc. Cloud masses are derived from CO (J=1-0) line emission. Stellar masses are obtained using the young stellar object (YSO) counting method. In our sample, most of the clouds exhibit star formation efficiency (SFE) below 1 per cent while a few of them show SFE up to 3.5 per cent, consistent with other cloud scale studies. We examine the dependence of SFE and star formation rate (SFR) on cloud mass as well as their variation with Galactocentric distance. We also re-evaluate the scaling relation between star formation rate surface density (Sigma_SFR) and gas surface density (Sigma_gas) commonly known as the Kennicutt-Schmidt law, and obtain a best-fitting power-law slope of 0.41 ± 0.36. Despite the large uncertainty, the derived power-law slope is significantly shallower than the canonical Kennicutt-Schmidt value of 1.4 ± 0.15 measured in external galaxies. Our best-fit slope is also notably different from those reported in other studies on Milky Way molecular clouds (mostly situated away from the Galactic plane) and clumps. This indicates that the clouds in the Galactic plane do not follow the global scaling relation, likely reflecting the influence of local physical conditions or different gas dynamics. The range of vertical heights of our sample with respect to the Galactic plane spans 0.28 to 162.48 pc and we also observe a weakly declining trend of SFE with increasing vertical height. |
