Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-d8cs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-15T06:58:23.401Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Schmidt Law Decoded and Explained

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2016

Barry F. Madore
Barry F. Madore*
Affiliation:
The Observatories, Carnegie Institution for Science, 813 Santa Barbara Street, Pasadena CA 91101 email: barry@ociw.org
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Like the Bode-Titius Law before it, the Schmidt Law is not properly understood, given that it has never been reduced to, or predicted from first principles. Star formation is complicated. And, it is almost certainly a multi-scale process that has multiple immediate causes (quiescent, periodic and impulsive in their time dependence; local, global and cosmic/external in their origin) resulting in the same end product: stars. Philosophers of science would say that the theory of star formation is “massively underdetermined by the observations” of stars alone.

Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 11 , General Assembly A29B: Astronomy in Focus , August 2015 , pp. 705
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2016 

References

Einasto, J. 1972, Ap. Lett., 11, 195 Google Scholar
Madore, B. F. 1977, MNRAS, 178, 1 Google Scholar
Madore, B. F. 2010, ApJ, 716, L131 Google Scholar
Sanduleak, N. 1969, AJ, 74, 47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, M. 1959, ApJ, 129, 243 Google Scholar
Zaritsky, D., Harris, J., Grebel, E. K., & Massey, P. 2002, ApJ, 123, 855 Google Scholar