Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 629

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 50 of the 50 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Slow Star Formation in Dense Gas: Evidence and Implications

Open access
Krumholz, Mark R., Tan, Jonathan C.·2007·The Astrophysical Journal
DOI 10.1086/509101
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

It has been known for more than 30 years that star formation in giant molecular clouds (GMCs) is slow, in the sense that only ~1% of the gas forms stars every free-fall time. This result is entirely independent of any particular model of molecular cloud lifetime or evolution. Here we survey observational data on higher density objects in the interstellar medium, including infrared dark clouds and dense molecular clumps, to determine whether these objects form stars slowly like GMCs, or rapidly, converting a significant fraction of their mass into stars in one free-fall time. We find no evidence for a transition from slow to rapid star formation in structures covering 3 orders of magnitude in density. This has important implications for models of star formation, since competing models make differing predictions for the characteristic density at which star formation should transition from slow to rapid. The data are inconsistent with models that predict that star clusters form rapidly and in free-fall collapse. Magnetic- and turbulence-regulated star formation models can reproduce the observations qualitatively, and the turbulence-regulated star formation model of Krumholz & McKee quantitatively reproduces the infrared-HCN luminosity correlation recently reported by Gao & Solomon Slow star formation also implies that the process of star cluster formation cannot be one of global collapse, but must instead proceed over many free-fall times. This suggests that turbulence in star-forming clumps must be driven, and that the competitive accretion mechanism does not operate in typical cluster-forming molecular clumps.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1086/509101

Cites

50 of 50 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 50 references

Cited by

See all 629

Metadata

Authors
Krumholz, M. R., & Tan, J. C.
Venue
The Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
American Astronomical Society
Published
2007-01
Volume
654
Issue
1
Pages
304-315
ISSN
  • 0004-637X (ISSN-L)
  • 1538-4357
DOI
10.1086/509101
OpenAlex
W1981892568
Cited by
629
References
50
FWCI
10.99
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Slow Star Formation in Dense Gas: Evidence and Implications. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/509101
The paper
Krumholz, M. R., & Tan, J. C. (2007). Slow Star Formation in Dense Gas: Evidence and Implications. The Astrophysical Journal. https://doi.org/10.1086/509101

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.