Star Formation Induced by Cloud-Cloud Collisions and Galactic Giant Molecular Cloud Evolution

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cloud-cloud collisions influence star formation and the evolution of giant molecular clouds in galaxies, highlighting the significant role of massive GMCs in star formation due to CCC events.

Contribution

It reformulates the GMC evolution model to include star formation from cloud collisions, emphasizing the impact of massive GMCs on star formation rates.

Findings

CCC-driven star formation is mainly associated with massive GMCs > 10^5.5 Msun.

CCC events between smaller clouds are more frequent but less influential on star formation.

CCC may account for up to 30% of total star formation in the Milky Way.

Abstract

Recent radio observations towards nearby galaxies started to map the whole disk and to identify giant molecular clouds (GMCs) even in the regions between galactic spiral structures. Observed variations of GMC mass functions in different galactic environment indicates that massive GMCs preferentially reside along galactic spiral structures whereas inter-arm regions have many small GMCs. Based on the phase transition dynamics from magnetized warm neutral medium to molecular clouds, Kobayashi et al. 2017 proposes a semi-analytical evolutionary description for GMC mass functions including cloud-cloud collision (CCC) process. Their results show that CCC is less dominant in shaping the mass function of GMCs compared with the accretion of dense HI gas driven by the propagation of supersonic shock waves. However, their formulation does not take into account the possible enhancement of star formation by CCC. Radio observations within the Milky Way indicate the importance of CCC for the formation of star clusters and massive stars. In this article, we reformulate the time evolution equation largely modified from Kobayashi et al. 2017 so that we additionally compute star formation subsequently taking place in CCC clouds. Our results suggest that, although CCC events between smaller clouds outnumber the ones between massive GMCs, CCC-driven star formation is mostly driven by massive GMCs > 10^5.5 Msun (where Msun is the solar mass). The resultant cumulative CCC-driven star formation may amount to a few 10 percent of the total star formation in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies.