Observational Evidence of Dynamic Star Formation Rate in Milky Way Giant Molecular Clouds

Star formation on galactic scales is known to be a slow process, but whether it is slow on smaller scales is uncertain. We cross-correlate 5469 giant molecular clouds (GMCs) from a new all-sky catalog with 256 star forming complexes (SFCs) to build a sample of 191 SFC-GMC complexes---collections of multiple clouds each matched to 191 SFCs. The total mass in stars harbored by these clouds is inferred from WMAP free-free fluxes. We measure the GMC mass, the virial parameter, the star formation efficiency $\epsilon$ and the star formation rate per free-fall time $\epsilon_{\rm ff}$. Both $\epsilon$ and $\epsilon_{\rm ff}$ range over 3--4 orders of magnitude. We find that 68.3% of the clouds fall within $\sigma_{\log\epsilon}=0.79\pm0.22\,{\rm dex}$ and $\sigma_{\log\epsilon_{\rm ff}}=0.91\pm0.22\,{\rm dex}$ about the median. Compared to these observed scatters, a simple model with a time independent $\epsilon_{\rm ff}$ that depends on the host GMC properties predicts $\sigma_{\log\epsilon_{\rm ff}}=$0.12-0.24. Allowing for a time-variable $\epsilon_{\rm ff}$, we can recover the large dispersion in the rate of star formation. This strongly suggests that star formation in the Milky Way is a dynamic process on GMC scales. We also show that the surface star formation rate profile of the Milky Way correlates well with the molecular gas surface density profile.
Comment: accepted to ApJ; we added a discussion of multi-freefall models of star formation