Star Formation Efficiency in Low Surface Brightness Regions

Abstract

Low surface brightness regions are found not only in dwarf and ultra-diffuse galaxies, but also on the outer parts of giant spirals, or in galaxy extensions (tidal or ram-pressure tails, outflows or jets). Sometimes molecular gas is detected in sufficient quantities to allow star formation, but the efficiency is much lower than in disk galaxies. This presentation reviews different environments showing low-surface brightness, their gas content and surface densities, and their star formation efficiency. Some interpretations are proposed to account for this low efficiency.