DYNAMO Survey: An Upclose View of Clumpy Galaxies

We highlight recent results on the DYNAMO survey of turbulent, clumpy disks galaxies found at z=0.1. Bright star forming DYNAMO galaxies are found to be very similar in properties to star forming galaxies in the high redshift Universe. Typical star formation rates of turbulent DYNAMO galaxies range 10-80 M _⊙ yr^-1. Roughly 2/3 of DYNAMO galaxies have Hα kinematics that are consistent with rotation. The typical gas velocity dispersion of DYNAMO galaxies is σ _Hα ~ 20 - 60 km s^-1. We show that, when convolved to the same resolution, maps of Hα emission in DYNAMO galaxies have essentially identical morphology as that of z ~ 1 - 3 galaxies. Finally, DYNAMO galaxies have high molecular gas fractions f_mol ~ 20 - 35%. We note that DYNAMO galaxies are not dwarfs, typical masses are M_star ~ 0.8 - 8 × 10¹⁰ M_⊙. These data are all consistent with a scenario in which despite being at relatively low redshift the DYNAMO galaxies are forming stars similarly to that observed in the high-redshift Universe, that is to say star formation is occurring in very massive (M_clump ~ 10⁹ M_⊙), very large (r_clump ~ 300 pc) clumps of gas.