Star Formation from Galaxies to Globules

The empirical laws of star formation suggest that galactic-scale gravity is involved, but they do not identify the actual triggering mechanisms for clusters in the final stages. Many other triggering processes satisfy the empirical laws too, including turbulence compression and expanding shell collapse. The self-similar nature of the gas and associated young stars suggests that turbulence is more directly involved, but the small scale morphology of gas around most embedded clusters does not look like a random turbulent flow. Most clusters look triggered by other nearby stars. Such a prominent local influence makes it difficult to understand the universality of the Kennicutt and Schmidt laws on galactic scales. A unified view of multi-scale star formation avoids most of these problems. Ambient self-gravity produces spiral arms and drives much of the turbulence that leads to self-similar structures, while localized energy input from existing clusters and field supernovae triggers new clusters in pre-existing clouds. The hierarchical structure in the gas made by turbulence ensures that the triggering time scales with size, giving the Schmidt law over a wide range of scales and the size-duration correlation for young star fields. The efficiency of star formation is determined by the fraction of the gas above a critical density of around 10^5 m(H2)/cc. Star formation is saturated to its largest possible value given the fractal nature of the interstellar medium.