›Galactic Scale Star Formation

Understanding where and how efficiently gas is converted into stars within galaxies is of central importance for many fields of astrophysics. Nevertheless, a detailed understanding of the physical processes responsible for regulating the star formation process on galactic scales still eludes us.

Over the past few years, however, significant progress has been made towards this goal, on both the observational and theoretical fronts. On the observational side, the recent years have seen an explosion of new, sensitive, high resolution observations of the gas and young stars from the nearby universe out to distant galaxies. On the theoretical side, numerical simulations are finally becoming capable of modelling the galactic interstellar medium in sufficient detail to allow star formation and stellar feedback to be properly studied within galactic-scale simulations.

We therefore feel that the time is ripe for a conference bringing together observers and theorists working on the problem of star formation and feedback on galactic scales