CO luminosity is most often used as a proxy to detect the giant molecular clouds where this process occurs.
The rate of this process versus redshift is shown on a Madau plot. The surface density of this process is proportional to some power of the local surface density according to the Kennicutt-Schmidt law. The namesake spectroscopic feature of Lyman-break galaxies is caused by their Lyman-alpha lines being absorbed by regions in which this process occurs, and on a color-color diagram regions where this process occurs show infrared excess. Kroupa names a broken exponential function that gives the mass distribution of the products of this process; such a distribution is called an (*) IMF. This process can be triggered by the gravitational migration of neutral particles, called ambipolar diffusion, and the free-fall time is an important quantity in modelling it. CO luminosity is most often used as a proxy to detect the giant molecular clouds where this process occurs. This process, which can result in the formation of Herbig-Haro objects, occurs when a clump of matter in the ISM crosses the Bonnor-Ebert mass limit and collapses. For 10 points, name this process whose products go on to the Hayashi track of the HR diagram.
The rate of this process versus redshift is shown on a Madau plot.
star formation [accept common-language equivalents like stellar birth]