An observational test for star formation prescriptions in cosmological hydrodynamical simulations

Understand

State-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation have reached the point at which their outcomes result in galaxies with ever more realism.

• Still, the employed sub-grid models include several free parameters such as the density threshold, $n$, to localize the star-forming gas.
• In this work, we investigate the possibilities to utilize the observed clustered nature of star formation (SF) in order to refine SF prescriptions and constrain the density threshold parameter.
• To this end, we measure the clustering strength, correlation length and power-law index of the two-point correlation function of young ($\tau<50$ Myr) stellar particles and compare our results to observations from the HST Legacy Extragalactic UV Survey (LEGUS).