Estimate Star Formation Rate: Kennicutt-Schmidt Law

[Sagar_C]

How does one analytically estimate star formation rate in a plasma cloud? Could someone lead me to original references? Kennicutt-Schmidt Law, I guess, is empirical.

 

[zhermes]

I'm not familiar with any work that does this in more than order of magnitude sense. The general idea is to estimate the star formation rate as the molecular-gas infall rate - with some efficiency factor, e.g.

$$\rm{SFR} \sim \epsilon \cdot M_{H} \cdot t_\rm{dyn}^{-1}$$

Where $\epsilon$ is the efficiency factor (maybe ~0.1), and $t_\rm{dyn}$ is the dynamical time.