A comparison of the Milky Way's recent star formation revealed by dust thermal emission and high-mass stars

TL;DR

This study compares two independent methods of measuring the Milky Way's star formation rate, finding consistent results that suggest a roughly constant SFR over the past 10 million years, advancing our understanding of galactic star formation.

Contribution

It demonstrates that dust thermal emission and stellar population modeling yield consistent SFR estimates, validating the methods and providing new insights into the Galaxy's recent star formation history.

Findings

Both methods agree within a factor of two on SFR estimates.

The local SFR has remained roughly constant over the past 10 million years.

The agreement enhances confidence in different observational techniques.

Abstract

We present a comparison of the Milky Way's star formation rate (SFR) surface density ($\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$) obtained with two independent state-of-the-art observational methods. The first method infers $\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$ from observations of the dust thermal emission from interstellar dust grains in far-infrared wavelengths registered in the Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey (Hi-GAL). The second method determines $\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$ by modeling the current population of O-, B-, and A-type stars in a 6 kpc $\times$ 6 kpc area around the Sun. We find an agreement between the two methods within a factor of two for the mean SFRs and the SFR surface density profiles. Given the broad differences between the observational techniques and the independent assumptions in the methods for computing the SFRs, this agreement constitutes a significant advance in our understanding of the star formation of our Galaxy and implies that the local SFR has been roughly constant over the past 10\,Myr.