Relating dust, gas and the rate of star formation in M31

TL;DR

This study maps dust properties and star formation in M31, revealing correlations between dust, gas, and star formation rates, and highlighting the galaxy's lower star formation efficiency compared to M33.

Contribution

First detailed de-reddened H-alpha map of M31 derived from dust opacity and temperature data, enabling new insights into dust-gas-star formation relations.

Findings

Dust temperature decreases from 30K to 15K with radius.

Star formation rate in 6-17kpc region is ~0.3 solar masses per year.

M31 has a molecular depletion time scale of 1.1 Gyr, less efficient than M33.

Abstract

We derive distributions of dust temperature and dust opacity across M31 at 45" resolution using the Spitzer data. With the opacity map and a standard dust model we de-redden the Ha emission yielding the first de-reddened Ha map of M31. We compare the emissions from dust, Ha, HI and H2 by means of radial distributions, pixel-to-pixel correlations and wavelet cross-correlations. The dust temperature steeply decreases from 30K near the center to 15K at large radii. The mean dust optical depth at the Ha wavelength along the line of sight is about 0.7. The radial decrease of the dust-to-gas ratio is similar to that of the oxygen abundance. On scales<2kpc, cold dust emission is best correlated with that of neutral gas and warm dust emission with that of ionized gas. Ha emission is slightly better correlated with emission at 70um than at 24um. In the area 6kpc<R< 17kpc, the total SFR is ~0.3Msun/yr. The Kennicutt-Schmidt law between SFR and total gas has a power-law index of 1.30+-0.05 in the radial range of R=7-11kpc increasing by about 0.3 for R=11-13kpc. The lack of H2 in the central region could be related to the lack of HI and the low opacity/high temperature of the dust. Since neither SFR nor SFE is well correlated with the surface density of H2 or total gas, other factors than gas density must play an important role in the formation of massive stars in M31. The molecular depletion time scale of 1.1 Gyr indicates that M31 is about three times less efficient in forming young massive stars than M33.