Widespread star formation inside galactic outflows

Understand

Several models have predicted that stars could form inside galactic outflows and that this would be a new major mode of galaxy evolution.

• Observations of galactic outflows have revealed that they host large amounts of dense and clumpy molecular gas, which provide conditions suitable for star formation.
• We have investigated the properties of the outflows in a large sample of galaxies by exploiting the integral field spectroscopic data of the large MaNGA-SDSS4 galaxy survey.
• We find that star formation occurs inside at least half of the galactic outflows in our sample.