This award will support Professor Edwin E. Salpeter of Cornell University in a research collaboration with a group of Italian astrophysicists, headed by Professor Francesco Palla of the Arcetri Observatory in Florence, Italy. The research will continue a long-standing collaboration in which basic theoretical physics has been applied to a variety of astrophysical problems. For this award, the collaborating researchers intend to focus on two problems: the physical state of an outer galactic disk and star formation by slow accretion. The two research groups involved in the collaboration are among the most distinguished groups of astrophysicists at the international level and have been very productive. While the Italian group works on smaller scale regions and their approach is slightly different from the large-scale flows studied by the Cornell group, the basic physics is the same and the two approaches should complement each other.
