The Milky Way as a Star Formation Engine

Abstract

The cycling of material from the interstellar medium (ISM) into stars and the return of stellar ejecta into the ISM is the engine that drives the "galactic ecology" in normal spirals, a cornerstone in the formation and evolution of galaxies through cosmic time. Major observational and theoretical challenges need to be addressed in determining the processes responsible for converting the low-density ISM into dense molecular clouds, forming dense filaments and clumps, fragmenting them into stars, OB associations and bound clusters, and characterizing the feedback that limits the rate and efficiency of star formation. This formidable task can be now effectively attacked thanks to the combination of new global-scale surveys of the Milky Way Galactic Plane from infrared to radio wavelengths, offering the possibility of bridging the gap between local and extragalactic star formation studies. The Herschel, Spitzer and WISE mid to far infrared continuum surveys, complemented by analogue surveys from ground-based facilities in the millimetre and radio wavelengths, enables us to measure the Galactic distribution and physical properties of dust on all scales and in all components of the ISM from diffuse clouds to filamentary complexes and tens of thousands of dense clumps. A complementary suite of spectroscopic surveys in various atomic and molecular tracers is providing the chemical fingerprinting of dense clumps and filaments, as well as essential kinematic information to derive distances and thus transform panoramic data into a 3D representation. The latest results emerging from these Galaxy-scale surveys are reviewed. New insights into cloud formation and evolution, filaments and their relationship to channeling gas onto gravitationally-bound clumps, the properties of these clumps, density thresholds for gravitational collapse, and star and cluster formation rates are discussed.