Star formation induced by cloud–cloud collisions and galactic giant molecular cloud evolution

Abstract

Abstract Recent millimeter/submillimeter observations towards nearby galaxies have started to map the whole disk and to identify giant molecular clouds (GMCs) even in the regions between galactic spiral structures. Observed variations of GMC mass functions in different galactic environments indicates that massive GMCs preferentially reside along galactic spiral structures whereas inter-arm regions have many small GMCs. Based on the phase transition dynamics from magnetized warm neutral medium to molecular clouds, Kobayashi et al. (2017, ApJ, 836, 175) proposes a semi-analytical evolutionary description for GMC mass functions including a cloud–cloud collision (CCC) process. Their results show that CCC is less dominant in shaping the mass function of GMCs than the accretion of dense H i gas driven by the propagation of supersonic shock waves. However, their formulation does not take into account the possible enhancement of star formation by CCC. Millimeter/submillimeter observations within the Milky Way indicate the importance of CCC in the formation of star clusters and massive stars. In this article, we reformulate the time-evolution equation largely modified from Kobayashi et al. (2017, ApJ, 836, 175) so that we additionally compute star formation subsequently taking place in CCC clouds. Our results suggest that, although CCC events between smaller clouds are more frequent than the ones between massive GMCs, CCC-driven star formation is mostly driven by massive GMCs $\gtrsim 10^{5.5}\,M_{\odot }$ (where M⊙ is the solar mass). The resultant cumulative CCC-driven star formation may amount to a few 10 percent of the total star formation in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies.