The Milky Way has maintained a roughly constant star formation history
for billions of years. Owing to uncertainties in the gas inflow rate,
the gas consumption process, and the way neutral HI converts into
molecular gas, how or why our Galaxy has stayed so even-tempered
remains unclear. We use cosmological simulations to develop some
intuition about the properties of the Milky Way at z~1. We then use
hydrodynamical simulations of a Galaxy analogue in isolation with the
Robertson &Kravtsov (2008) model for the molecular ISM to study how
regulated star formation and gas consumption proceeded dynamically
over the recent history of the Milky Way, and extrapolate our results
to predict the fate of Galactic star formation in the future.
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