Bimodality of low-redshift circumgalactic O VI in non-equilibrium EAGLE zoom simulations

By B. Oppenheimer, Robert A. Crain, Joop Schaye, A. Rahmati, A. J. Richings, James W. Trayford, Jason Tumlinson, Richard G. Bower, Matthieu Schaller, Tom Theuns. 2016

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We introduce a series of 20 cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of L⇤ (M200 = 1011.7 − 1012.3M") and group-sized (M200 = 1012.7 − 1013.3M") haloes run with the model used for the EAGLE project, which additionally includes a nonequilibrium ionization and cooling module that follows 136 ions. The simulations reproduce the observed correlation, revealed by COS-Halos at z ⇠ 0.2, between Ovi column density at impact parameters b 106 K) promotes oxygen to higher ionization states, suppressing the Ovi column density. The observed NOvi-sSFR correlation therefore does not imply a causal link, but reflects the changing characteristic ionization state of oxygen as halo mass is increased. In spite of the mass-dependence of the oxygen ionization state, the most abundant circumgalactic oxygen ion in both L⇤ and group haloes is Ovii; Ovi accounts for only 0.1% of the oxygen in group haloes and 0.9-1.3% with L⇤ haloes. Nonetheless, the metals traced by Ovi absorbers represent a fossil record of the feedback history of galaxies over a Hubble time; their characteristic epoch of ejection corresponds to z > 1 and much of the ejected metal mass resides beyond the virial radius of galaxies. For both L⇤ and group galaxies, more of the oxygen produced and released by stars resides in the circumgalactic medium (within twice the virial radius) than in the stars and ISM of the galaxy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ea0c2a60a2405e5aac0c4a53b57a3d5fbe7bad7

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Citations in the corpus

The optical afterglow of the short gamma-ray burst associated with GW170817 (2018, background): “The energy is consistent with that seen for cosmological GRBs, where a third of the short GRB population has an isotropic jet kinetic energy larger than ∼ 10(52) erg,(63) the micro-physical parameters εB and εe are comfortably in the expected range, 70 and the ambient density is reasonable for the l”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “…accurate (see e.g. Gnat & Sternberg 2007, Oppenheimer & Schaye 2013a) and first steps in this direction have been made in galaxy scale simulations (Forbes et al. 2016; Hu et al. 2016; Oppenheimer et al. 2016; Oppenheimer & Schaye 2013b; Richings & Schaye 2016; Richings, Schaye & Oppenheimer 2014).”
Probing Galactic Halos with Fast Radio Bursts (2019, background): “High column density measurements of O+5 have revealed a more highly-ionized plasma, interpreted by many as a tracer of the predicted T & 106 K virialized halo gas (e.g. Oppenheimer et al. 2016; Faerman et al. 2017; Mathews & Prochaska 2017).”
Figuring Out Gas & Galaxies in Enzo (FOGGIE). I. Resolving Simulated Circumgalactic Absorption at 2 ≤ z ≤ 2.5 (2018, background): “…galaxy evolution have met with mixed success in reproducing the observed column densities of low- or highionization circumgalactic gas, despite creating realistic-looking galaxies (Hummels et al. 2013; Ford et al. 2016; Oppenheimer et al. 2016; Suresh et al. 2017; see also Tumlinson et al. 2017).”
THE COS-HALOS SURVEY: ORIGINS OF THE HIGHLY IONIZED CIRCUMGALACTIC MEDIUM OF STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2016, methodology): “Under the standard assumption of ionization equilibrium and a combination of photo- and collisional ionization, simulators compare their model-derived radial distributions of Ovi absorption with the Ovi column density distributions from observations (though see Oppenheimer et al. 2016).”
The Circumgalactic Medium (2017, methodology): “≥ 8.5 star-forming EAGLE halos, with a moving average smoothing (Oppenheimer et al. 2016b).”
The COS-Halos Survey: Metallicities in the Low-redshift Circumgalactic Medium (2017, background): “Instead, it may favor scenarios where the CGM was polluted by one or more processes long ago (Davé & Oppenheimer 2007; Ford et al. 2014; Oppenheimer et al. 2016)5.”
The impact of star formation feedback on the circumgalactic medium (2016, background): “Furthermore, Oppenheimer et al. (2016) demonstrated that taking nonequilibrium effects into consideration does not significantly alter the cooling of halo gas nor the resulting Ovi column densities.”
The formation and assembly history of the Milky Way revealed by its globular cluster population (2018, background): “…galaxy stellar masses and sizes (Furlong et al. 2015, 2017), their photometric properties (Trayford et al. 2015) and cold gas content (e.g. Lagos et al. 2015; Bahé et al. 2016; Crain et al. 2017), and key properties of the circumgalactic medium (e.g. Rahmati et al. 2015; Oppenheimer et al. 2016).”