KINEMATICAL PROPERTIES OF GIANT MOLECULAR CLOUDS AND STAR-FORMING EFFICIENCY

We are interested in the relationship between interacting luminous gal axies and their star forming efficiency. However, because of the limit ation of available data, we have studied kinematic properties of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) associated with the star-forming regions in o ur Galaxy. We found that the star-forming efficiency (SFE) is correlat ed not only with the gas density (n), but also strongly with the veloc ity dispersion (sigma(v)) and the mass of a GMC. We obtained a modifie d Schmidt's law by fitting the derived SEE to the gas density and velo city dispersion to be: SFE proportional to n(alpha)sigma(v)(beta) wher e the indices were determined as alpha similar to 0.03 and beta simila r to -3.3. This implies that stars are born more efficiently in a quie t cloud than in a disturbed cloud, and that the SFE is strongly depend ent on the kinematical property of gas clouds.