The Schmidt Law in Six Galactic Massive Star-forming Regions

Abstract

We present a census of young stars in five massive star-forming regions in the 4th Galactic quadrant, G305, G326-4, G326-6, G333 (RCW 106), and G351, and combine this census with an earlier census of young stars in NGC 6334. Each region was observed at J, H, and K_s with the NOAO Extremely Wide-Field Infrared Imager and combined with deep observations taken with the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on board the Spitzer Space Telescope at the wavelengths 3.6 and 4.5 μm. We derived a five band point-source catalog containing >200,000 infrared sources in each region. We have identified a total of 2871 YSO candidates, 363 Class I YSOs, and 2508 Class II YSOs. We mapped the column density of each cloud using observations from Herschel between 160 and 500 μm and near-infrared extinction maps in order to determine the average gas surface density above A_V > 2. We study the surface density of the YSOs and the star-formation rate as a function of the column density within each cloud and compare them to the results for nearby star-forming regions. We find a range in power-law indices across the clouds, with the dispersion in the local relations in an individual cloud much lower than the average over the six clouds. We find the average over the six clouds to be {{{Σ }}}_{SFR}∼ {{{Σ }}}_{gas}^{2.15+/- 0.41} and power-law exponents ranging from 1.77 to 2.86, similar to the values derived within nearby star-forming regions, including Taurus and Orion. The large dispersion in the power-law relations between individual Milky Way molecular clouds reinforces the idea that there is not a direct universal connection between Σ_gas and a cloud's observed star-formation rate.