Star formation rates and efficiencies in the Galactic Centre

Understand

The inner few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way harbours gas densities, pressures, velocity dispersions, an interstellar radiation field and a cosmic ray ionisation rate orders of magnitude higher than the disc; akin to the environment found in star-forming galaxies at high-redshift.

• Previous studies have shown that this region is forming stars at a rate per unit mass of dense gas which is at least an order of magnitude lower than in the disc, potentially violating theoretical predictions.
• We show that all observational star formation rate diagnostics - both direct counting of young stellar objects and integrated light measurements - are in agreement within a factor two, hence the low star formation rate is not the result of the systematic uncertainties that affect any one method.
• As these methods trace the star formation over different timescales, from $0.1 - 5$ Myr, we conclude that the star formation rate has been constant to within a factor of a few within this time period.