DIRECT NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF RADIATION PRESSURE-DRIVEN TURBULENCE AND WINDS IN STAR CLUSTERS AND GALACTIC DISKS

By Mark R. Krumholz, T. Thompson. 2012

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The pressure exerted by the radiation of young stars may be an important feedback mechanism that drives turbulence and winds in forming star clusters and the disks of starburst galaxies. However, there is great uncertainty in how efficiently radiation couples to matter in these high optical depth environments. In particular, it is unclear what levels of turbulence the radiation can produce, and whether the infrared radiation trapped by the dust opacity can give rise to heavily mass-loaded winds. In this paper, we report a series of two-dimensional flux-limited diffusion radiation-hydrodynamics calculations performed with the code orion in which we drive strong radiation fluxes through columns of dusty matter confined by gravity in order to answer these questions. We consider both systems where the radiation flux is sub-Eddington throughout the gas column, and those where it is super-Eddington at the midplane but sub-Eddington in the atmosphere. In the latter, we find that the radiation–matter interaction gives rise to radiation-driven Rayleigh–Taylor instability, which drives supersonic turbulence at a level sufficient to fully explain the turbulence seen in Galactic protocluster gas clouds, and to make a non-trivial contribution to the turbulence observed in starburst galaxy disks. However, the instability also produces a channel structure in which the radiation–matter interaction is reduced compared to time-steady analytic models because the radiation field is not fully trapped. For astrophysical parameters relevant to forming star clusters and starburst galaxies, we find that this effect reduces the net momentum deposition rate in the dusty gas by a factor of ∼2–6 compared to simple analytic estimates, and that in steady state the Eddington ratio reaches unity and there are no strong winds. We provide an approximation formula, appropriate for implementation in analytic models and non-radiative simulations, for the force exerted by the infrared radiation field in this regime.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/16c30bf329f30e7e87396d9b5d6ca1a8018d2341

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Citations in the corpus

Radiative feedback and the low efficiency of galaxy formation in low-mass haloes at high redshift (2013, background): “Krumholz & Thompson (2012, 2013) argue that the multiplicative effect of infrared photons has been overestimated in previous works and the boost in radiation pressure is much weaker, on the order of unity.”
The confinement of star-forming galaxies into a main sequence through episodes of gas compaction, depletion and replenishment (2015, methodology): “The radiative stellar feedback assumed no infrared trapping, in the spirit of low trapping advocated by Dekel & Krumholz (2013) based on Krumholz & Thompson (2012).”
Cool Gas in High-Redshift Galaxies (2013, background): “…ie. a self–gravitating disk supported by 1Including a correction for the relative contribution of the CMB increases these values by about 35% at z = 2.5 (Ivison et al. 2011). starburst–driven radiation pressure on the dust grains (Thompson et al. 2005; Thompson 2009; Krumholz & Thompson 2012).”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “Based on small scale simulations, Krumholz & Thompson (2013) argue that the momentum input does not exceed L/c due to the structure, and therefore inefficient trapping, developing in the ISM (Krumholz & Thompson 2012).”
Supernova feedback in an inhomogeneous interstellar medium (2014, methodology): “…in galaxy-scale or cosmological simulations should (as much as possible) be tested and refined using higher resolution smaller-volume simulations that capture more of the key physics (as in this paper and e.g. work on radiation pressure feedback by Krumholz & Thompson 2012; Davis et al. 2014).”
Global hierarchical collapse in molecular clouds. Towards a comprehensive scenario (2019, background): “However, the full numerical simulations of MCs mentioned above (Dale et al. 2012, 2013; Krumholz & Thompson 2012, 2013; Coĺın et al. 2013; Iffrig & Hennebelle 2015, 2017; Körtgen et al. 2016; Wareing et al. 2017a,b; Seifried et al. 2018), which have included various forms of feedback, generally…”
TOWARD A COMPLETE ACCOUNTING OF ENERGY AND MOMENTUM FROM STELLAR FEEDBACK IN GALAXY FORMATION SIMULATIONS (2012, background): “Note that these estimates assume a homogeneous and static distribution of dense gas around the young star clusters, and the effective values of τIR around young clusters are quite uncertain (e.g., Hopkins et al. 2011b; Kuiper et al. 2012; Krumholz & Thompson 2012).”
Feedback from winds and supernovae in massive stellar clusters – I. Hydrodynamics (2012, background): “However, these works disagree on the net momentum coupling between the radiation field and the gas, partially because this depends on the degree of inhomogeneity of the gas and the effect that this has on the radiation field (e.g. Krumholz & Thompson 2012).”
Galaxies on FIRE (Feedback In Realistic Environments): stellar feedback explains cosmologically inefficient star formation (2013, background): “…in Appendix B. 6 There has been some debate in the literature regarding whether or not the full τIR “boost” applies to the infrared radiation pressure when τIR 1 (see e.g. Krumholz & Thompson 2012, but also Kuiper et al. 2012 and Davis et al. (2014), who find much stronger effects in the infrared).”
What controls star formation in the central 500 pc of the Galaxy (2013, unknown): “…a young, wellsampled stellar population (Thompson, Quataert & Murray 2005), and the term in parentheses indicates the optical depth1 + φtrτ with τ ∼ κRΣ ∼ κ0T 2Σ, in which φtr ≡ ftr/τ ∼ 0.2 (Krumholz & Thompson 2012) is a constant that indicates the fraction of infrared radiation that is trapped…”
Toy models for galaxy formation versus simulations (2013, background): “There is potentially enough energy and momentum in supernovae, radiative feedback and winds (Dekel, Sari & Ceverino 2009; Bournaud et al. 2010; Krumholz & Thompson 2012, 2013; Dekel & Krumholz 2013), but it is not clear whether they are properly deposited within the disc.”
On the fraction of star formation occurring in bound stellar clusters (2012, unknown): “…pressure reads Prad = (1 + φtrτ )F c ∼ (1 + φtrκR GMC) M 4πR2GMCc = (1 + φtrκR GMC) rad GMC 4c , (C1) where τ ∼ κR GMC is the optical depth, φtr ≡ f tr/τ ∼ 0.2 (Krumholz & Thompson 2012) is a constant that indicates the fraction of infrared radiation that is trapped at an optical depth τ =…”
The SILCC (SImulating the LifeCycle of molecular Clouds) project - II. Dynamical evolution of the supernova-driven ISM and the launching of outflows (2015, background): “Although being generally less efficient than UV photoheating, direct radiation pressure is expected to drive dynamical feedback (Krumholz & Matzner 2009; Murray, Quataert & Thompson 2010; Krumholz & Thompson 2012; Sales et al. 2014).”
The SILCC project - III. Regulation of star formation and outflows by stellar winds and supernovae (2016, background): “…2012; Walch et al. 2012, 2013; Dale et al. 2014; Geen et al. 2015), radiation pressure (e.g. Krumholz & Matzner 2009; Murray, Quataert & Thompson 2010; Krumholz & Thompson 2012), stellar winds (e.g. Wünsch et al. 2008, 2011; Pellegrini, Baldwin & Ferland 2011; Toalá & Arthur 2011; Dale, Ercolano…”
Evolution of density profiles in high-z galaxies: compaction and quenching inside-out (2015, methodology): “The radiative stellar feedback assumed no infrared trapping, in the spirit of low trapping advocate by Dekel & Krumholz (2013) based on Krumholz & Thompson (2012).”
THE LONG LIVES OF GIANT CLUMPS AND THE BIRTH OF OUTFLOWS IN GAS-RICH GALAXIES AT HIGH REDSHIFT (2013, methodology): “We use a trapping parameter κ = 5 to account for multiple scattering: this is rather high but is realistic as it compensates for other sources of momentum that are not explicitly included, such as (proto)-stellar winds (Krumholz & Thompson 2012; Dekel & Krumholz 2013).”