David Cook (Caltech)

Large and Small Star Formation in the Age of All-Sky Surveys // The global star formation properties of galaxies are ultimately the summation of the clustered formation of stars and star clusters on smaller scales. Yet, it is not clear how the properties of large and small star formation scales are connected, nor whether and how environment has an effect on this connection. Over the past several decades, many studies have investigated trends between star-forming regions and global galaxy properties with conflicting results, often due to small galaxy samples. For my talk, I first present results from two surveys using 10s-100 galaxies to test relationships between large and small scales of star formation. I then introduce the Census of the Local Universe (CLU) Hα galaxy survey, which can identify 10s of thousands of star-forming regions in 100s of nearby galaxies. The survey uses 4 contiguous narrowband filters to search for emission-line (Hα) sources across ~3π sr (26,470 deg^2) of the sky. Combining CLU-Hα with GALEX and WISE all-sky fluxes for nearby galaxies will provide the largest database of star-forming regions in the local Universe, with uniformly derived global galaxy properties. Building a repository of these regions and highlighting them in the NED database will benefit astronomers with a wide range of expertise and interests (e.g., star formation, transients, galaxy structure). Finally, I will touch on a few highlights from the CLU survey, demonstrating its impact on several areas of astrophysical research: galactic plane sources, counterparts to gravitational waves, and intermediate redshift galaxies.