Abstract
We present a comparison of the Milky Way's star formation rate (SFR) surface
density ($\Sigma_SFR$) obtained with two independent state-of-the-art
observational methods. The first method infers $\Sigma_SFR$ from the
observations of the dust thermal emission from interstellar dust grains in far
infrared wavelengths registered in the Herschel Infrared Galactic Plane Survey
(Hi-GAL), as presented in Elia et al. (2022). The second method obtains
$\Sigma_SFR$ by modeling the current population of O-, B-, and A-type
stars in a 6 kpc $\times$ 6 kpc area around the Sun, as presented in Zari et
al. (2023). We found an agreement between the two methods within a factor of
two for the mean SFRs and the SFR surface density profiles. Given the broad
differences between the observational techniques and the independent
assumptions in the methods to compute the SFRs, this agreement constitutes a
significant advance in our understanding of the star formation of our Galaxy
and implies that the local SFR has been roughly constant over the past 10 Myr.
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