Implementing Dust Shielding as a Criteria for Star Formation

Understand

Star formation is observed to be strongly correlated to dense regions of molecular gas.

• Although the exact nature of the link between star formation and molecular hydrogen is still unclear, some have suggested that shielding of dense gas by dust grains is the key factor enabling the presence of both.
• We present a sub-grid model for use in galaxy formation simulations in which star formation is linked explicitly to local dust shielding.
• We developed and tested our shielding and star formation models using smoothed particle hydrodynamic simulations of solar and sub-solar metallicity isolated Milky Way-mass disk galaxies.