High-precision star formation efficiency measurements in nearby clouds

Abstract

Abstract On average molecular clouds convert only a small fraction εff of their mass into stars per free-fall time, but different star formation theories make contrasting claims for how this low mean efficiency is achieved. To test these theories, we need precise measurements of both the mean value and the scatter of εff, but high-precision measurements have been difficult because they require determining cloud volume densities, from which we can calculate free-fall times. Until recently, most density estimates treated clouds as uniform spheres, while their real structures are often filamentary and highly non-uniform, yielding systematic errors in εff estimates and smearing real cloud-to-cloud variations. We recently developed a theoretical model to reduce this error by using column density distributions in clouds to produce more accurate volume density estimates. In this work, we apply this model to recent observations of 12 nearby molecular clouds. Compared to earlier analyses, our method reduces the typical dispersion of εff within individual clouds from 0.16 dex to 0.12 dex, and decreases the median value of εff over all clouds from ≈0.02 to ≈0.01. However, we find no significant change in the ≈0.2 dex cloud-to-cloud dispersion of εff, suggesting the measured dispersions reflect real structural differences between clouds.