Comment Regarding the Functional Form of the Schmidt Law

Abstract

Star formation rates on the galactic scale are described phenomenologically by two distinct relationships, as emphasized recently by Elmegreen (2002). The first of these is the Schmidt law, which is a power-law relation between the star formation rate and the column density. The other relationship is that there is a cutoff in the gas density below which star formation shuts off. The purpose of this paper is to argue that 1) these two relationships can be accommodated by a single functional form of the Schmidt law, and 2) this functional form is motivated by the hypothesis that star formation is a critical phenomenon, and that as a corollary, 3) the existence of a sharp cutoff may thus be an emergent property of galaxies, as was argued by Seiden (1983), as opposed to the classical view that this cutoff is due to an instability criterion.