A diversity of starburst-triggering mechanisms in interacting galaxies and their signatures in CO emission

Understand

The physical origin of enhanced star formation activity in interacting galaxies remains an open question.

• Knowing whether starbursts are triggered by an increase of the quantity of dense gas or an increase of the star formation efficiency would improve our understanding of galaxy evolution and allow to transpose the results obtained in the local Universe to high redshift galaxies.
• In this paper, we analyze a parsec-resolution simulation of an Antennae-like model of interacting galaxies.
• We find that the interplay of physical processes has complex and important variations in time and space, through different combinations of mechanisms like tides, shear and turbulence.