2025MNRAS.536.2936W

In the Milky Way and other main-sequence galaxies, stars form exclusively in molecular gas, which is traced by CO emission. However, low-metallicity dwarf galaxies are often 'CO-dark' in the sense that CO emission is not observable even at the high resolution and sensitivities of modern observing facilities. In this work, we use ultra high-resolution simulations of four low-metallicity dwarf galaxies (which resolve star formation down to the scale of star-forming cores, 0.01 pc) combined with a time-dependent treatment of the chemistry of the interstellar medium, to investigate the star formation environment in this previously hidden regime. By generating synthetic observations of our models we show that the galaxies have high to extremely high dark gas fractions (0.13 to 1.00 dependent on beam size and conditions), yet despite this form stars. However, when examined on smaller scales, we find that the stars still form in regions dominated by molecular gas, it is simply that these are far smaller than the scale of the beam (1.5 arcsec). Thus, while stars in CO-dark dwarf galaxies form in small molecular cores like larger galaxies, their cloud-scale environment is very different.