Wednesday

Observations of the cold gas in large galaxy samples, either via direct tracers like CO and HI or indirect ones like dust continuum, are proving vital to our understanding of what sets the ability of galaxies to form stars. It does so by allowing the question to be broken down into the availability of gas, and the efficiency of the star formation process out of any gas available.  In this talk I will review what surveys have revealed about the systematic variations in gas mass fraction and star formation efficiency across the galaxy population, and how those scaling relations can be used to explain key observables such as the shape of the galaxy main sequence and deviations from it.