Neutral hydrogen in galaxy haloes at the peak of the cosmic star formation history

By C. Faucher-Giguére, P. Hopkins, D. Keres̆, A. Muratov, E. Quataert, N. M. Northwestern, Caltech, U. Diego, Uc Berkeley, Cita. 2014

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use high-resolution cosmological zoom-in simulations from the FIRE (Feedback in Realistic Environments) project to make predictions for the covering fractions of neutral hydrogen around galaxies at z = 2–4. These simulations resolve the interstellar medium of galaxies and explicitly implement a comprehensive set of stellar feedback mechanisms. Our simulation sample consists of 16 main haloes covering the mass range M_h ≈ 10^9–6 × 10^(12) M_⊙ at z = 2, including 12 haloes in the mass range M_h ∼ 10^(11)–10^(12) M_⊙ corresponding to Lyman break galaxies (LBGs). We process our simulations with a ray tracing method to compute the ionization state of the gas. Galactic winds increase the H i covering fractions in galaxy haloes by direct ejection of cool gas from galaxies and through interactions with gas inflowing from the intergalactic medium. Our simulations predict H i covering fractions for Lyman limit systems (LLSs) consistent with measurements around z ∼ 2–2.5 LBGs; these covering fractions are a factor ∼2 higher than our previous calculations without galactic winds. The fractions of H i absorbers arising in inflows and in outflows are on average ∼50 per cent but exhibit significant time variability, ranging from ∼10 to ∼90 per cent. For our most massive haloes, we find a factor ∼3 deficit in the LLS covering fraction relative to what is measured around quasars at z ∼ 2, suggesting that the presence of a quasar may affect the properties of halo gas on ∼100 kpc scales. The predicted covering fractions, which decrease with time, peak at M_h ∼ 10^(11)–10^(12) M_⊙, near the peak of the star formation efficiency in dark matter haloes. In our simulations, star formation and galactic outflows are highly time dependent; H i covering fractions are also time variable but less so because they represent averages over large areas.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0cb5240879f60497c1dff70ebfdc444d3036f624

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Gusty, gaseous flows of FIRE: Galactic winds in cosmological simulations with explicit stellar feedback (2015, methodology): “The particle masses, softenings, and cosmological parameters employed in each run are given in Table 1, which is in part reproduced from H14, and Faucher-Giguère et al. (2015).”
FIRE-2 simulations: physics versus numerics in galaxy formation (2017, background): “…Wheeler et al. 2015, 2017; Wetzel et al. 2016); abundance gradients (El-Badry et al. 2016; Ma et al. 2017a); neutral hydrogen absorption in the CGM (Faucher-Giguere et al. 2015; Faucher-Giguère et al. 2016; Hafen et al. 2017); galactic outflows (Muratov et al. 2015, 2017; Anglés-Alcázar et al.…”
The impact of star formation feedback on the circumgalactic medium (2016, background): “These topics are, of course, also addressed by fully cosmological simulations focused on the CGM that incorporate stellar feedback (e.g., van de Voort & Schaye 2012; Shen et al. 2013; Ford et al. 2013; Faucher-Giguère et al. 2015, 2016; van de Voort et al. 2016).”
Forged in FIRE: cusps, cores and baryons in low-mass dwarf galaxies (2015, background): “Faucher-Giguère et al. (2015) recently showed that it also replicates the neutral hydrogen content of high-redshift halos.”
The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey - VIII. Extended Lyman-α haloes around high-z star-forming galaxies (2017, background): “Theoretical analyses and numerical simulations indeed predict that neutral hydrogen should be present around high-redshift star-forming galaxies (e.g. Kereš et al. 2005; Fumagalli et al. 2011; Faucher-Giguère et al. 2015).”
The structure and dynamical evolution of the stellar disc of a simulated Milky Way-mass galaxy (2016, methodology): “…et al. 2016), the Kennicutt–Schmidt law (M. Orr, in preparation), neutral hydrogen covering fractions around galaxies at both low and high redshift (Faucher-Giguère et al. 2015, 2016; Hafen et al. 2016), the stellar mass–metallicity relation (Ma et al. 2016), mass-loading factors of galactic…”
Not so lumpy after all: modelling the depletion of dark matter subhaloes by Milky Way-like galaxies (2017, background): “-size relation (El-Badry et al. 2016), the HI content of galaxy halos at both low and high redshift (Faucher-Giguère et al. 2015, 2016; Hafen et al. 2016), and the structure and star formation histories of isolated dwarf galaxies (Oñorbe et al. 2015; Chan et al. 2015; Fitts et al. 2016).”
The cosmic baryon cycle and galaxy mass assembly in the FIRE simulations (2016, background): “…2014; Feldmann et al. 2016), the mass–metallicity relation (Ma et al. 2016b), the HI covering fractions in Lyman-break galaxies and quasar-host halos (Faucher-Giguère et al. 2015, 2016), and the incidence and HI column density distribution of low-redshift Lyman limit systems (Hafen et al. 2016).”
Black holes on FIRE: stellar feedback limits early feeding of galactic nuclei (2017, methodology): “By implementing stellar feedback processes on the scale of starforming regions directly following stellar population synthesis models, the FIRE simulations reproduce a variety of galaxy (Hopkins et al. 2014; Ma et al. 2016; Feldmann et al. 2017) and CGM (Faucher-Giguère et al. 2015, 2016; Muratov e”
Stellar and Quasar Feedback in Concert: Effects on AGN Accretion, Obscuration, and Outflows (2015, unknown): “In a series of papers (Hopkins et al. 2014; Muratov et al. 2015; Oñorbe et al. 2015; van de Voort et al. 2015; Ma et al. 2015b,a; Faucher-Giguere et al. 2015), we showed that, on galactic scales, these models produce a quasi-steady ISM in which molecular clouds form and disperse rapidly, with phase…”
BREATHING FIRE: HOW STELLAR FEEDBACK DRIVES RADIAL MIGRATION, RAPID SIZE FLUCTUATIONS, AND POPULATION GRADIENTS IN LOW-MASS GALAXIES (2015, background): “…and m12i and showed that mass-loss from feedback-driven gas outflows can explain the suppressed star-formation efficiencies of low-mass galaxies; Faucher-Giguère et al. (2015) studied m10, m11, and m12i at redshifts z = 2−4 and found that these galaxies reproduce the the dense HI covering…”
The origin and evolution of the galaxy mass–metallicity relation (2015, methodology): “We also include a separate set of simulations run to z = 2 (z2hxxx series), which are presented in (Faucher-Giguère et al. 2015).”
UBIQUITOUS GIANT Lyα NEBULAE AROUND THE BRIGHTEST QUASARS AT z ∼ 3.5 REVEALED WITH MUSE (2016, background): “…formation and the emission properties of the 7 For similar discussions but more focused on absorption line studies around quasars, see Prochaska et al. 2013; Fumagalli et al. 2014; Rahmati et al. 2015; Meiksin et al. 2015; Faucher-Giguère et al. 2015 brightest quasars in the high-redshift Universe.”