Scaling laws in the interstellar medium across the cosmic evolution and star formation history

Yueh-Ning Lee^1*

¹Department of Earth Sciences, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

* Presenter:Yueh-Ning Lee, email:ynlee@ntnu.edu.tw

The interstellar medium is largely governed by turbulence and gravity, among all the other important physical mechanisms. These two mechanisms are scale-free in a considerably large dynamic range, and lead to many phenomenological power-law distribution of objects and events. I will discuss our current knowledge of the star formation processes, with a particular focus on how the properties of the self-gravitating turbulent medium give rise to the observed prestellar core mass function (CMF) and the stellar initial mass function (IMF). It is still a remaining debate whether these distributions, also subject to the influence of the magnetic field, radiative process, and stellar feedback, show variation across different star-formation epoch and environment. I will present existing observation results and the theoretical modelling that aim at providing some explanations.

Keywords: Star Formation, Interstellar Medium, Turbulence, Gravity, Initial Mass Function