The spatially resolved Kennicutt-Schmidt relation in the HI dominated regions of spiral and dwarf irregular galaxies

TL;DR

This study investigates the spatially resolved Kennicutt-Schmidt relation in HI-dominated regions of spiral and dwarf irregular galaxies, revealing a consistent power-law slope and suggesting star formation independence from metallicity in these regions.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation at multiple spatial scales in HI-dominated regions, using UV-based SFR measurements to reduce biases.

Findings

Power-law slope of 1.5 in HI regions for both galaxy types

Offset towards longer gas consumption timescales compared to molecular regions

Star formation appears independent of metallicity in HI-dominated areas

Abstract

We study the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation between average star formation rate and average cold gas surface density in the Hi dominated ISM of nearby spiral and dwarf irregular galaxies. We divide the galaxies into grid cells varying from sub-kpc to tens of kpc in size. Grid-cell measurements of low SFRs using H-alpha emission can be biased and scatter may be introduced because of non-uniform sampling of the IMF or because of stochastically varying star formation. In order to alleviate these issues, we use far-ultraviolet emission to trace SFR, and we sum up the fluxes from different bins with the same gas surface density to calculate the average $\Sigma_{SFR}$ at a given value of $\Sigma_{gas}$. We study the resulting Kennicutt-Schmidt relation in 400 pc, 1 kpc and 10 kpc scale grids in nearby massive spirals and in 400 pc scale grids in nearby faint dwarf irregulars. We find a relation with a power law slope of 1.5 in the HI-dominated regions for both kinds of galaxies. The relation is offset towards longer gas consumption timescales compared to the molecular hydrogen dominated centres of spirals, but the offset is an order-of-magnitude less than that quoted by earlier studies. Our results lead to the surprising conclusion that conversion of gas to stars is independent of metallicity in the HI dominated regions of star-forming galaxies. Our observed relations are better fit by a model of star formation based on thermal and hydrostatic equilibrium in the ISM, in which feedback driven turbulence sets the thermal pressure.