Star Formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud
Session 51 -- Dwarf Galaxies
Display presentation, Tuesday, 10, 1995, 9:20am - 6:30pm

## [51.14] Star Formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Douglas Caldwell, Marc Kutner (NRAO, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

We present a study of star forming giant molecular clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We have mapped 21 GMCs in both far--infrared (FIR) and $^{12}$CO\, (J=$1\!\rightarrow\!0$). FIR observations are from the IRAS High Resolution reprocessed data set. For our regions the resolutions of these maps are $\sim$ 45''--1' at 60\,$\mu$m and 1'15'' at 100\,$\mu$m. CO observations were made on the SEST (15m). They are in the form of fully sampled (half--beamwidth) maps with a resolution of 40''. This corresponds to a linear resolution of 10\,pc at the LMC. For clouds which show good CO--FIR correspondence we calculate CO and FIR luminosities. The FIR and CO luminosities of the LMC clouds are compared to those of Milky Way GMCs. 'Star formation activity,' defined as the star formation per unit cloud mass (FIR luminosity/virial mass), is used as a measure of how actively the clouds are forming stars. The star formation activities of the LMC clouds will be compared with those of Milky Way clouds.