From Atomic Gas to Star Formation
Since the 2015 SKA Chapters, the advent of panchromatic observations of nearby galaxies, capable of resolving the interstellar medium (ISM) into individual star-forming regions and molecular clouds, has revolutionized our understanding of the star formation cycle in galaxies. Despite these advances, our understanding of the gas cycle in galaxies remains limited because we know little about how the cold atomic phase of the ISM, which dominates its mass budget, participates in the cycle. Specifically, the processes regulating the condensation of atomic gas into molecular gas, the balance between warm and cold atomic gas, and their dependence on local environment and star formation activity have been explored only in the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds. The SKA presents a new opportunity to observe the atomic ISM within nearby galaxies at comparable resolution to other facilities and is the only facility that can make wide-area surveys of atomic gas across a statistical sample of galaxies at high (<100 pc) spatial resolution. Such observations will directly address the open questions about the evolution of the star-forming ISM. We present recent results from SKA-like observations of the Local Group made with SKA pathfinders and the Jansky VLA to illustrate the promise of replicating those observations for hundreds of nearby galaxies, reaching out to the Virgo cluster.