Chemical enrichment of the intracluster and intergalactic medium in a hierarchical galaxy formation model

By G. Lucia, G. Kauffmann, Simon D. M. White. 2003

301 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use a combination of high-resolution N-body simulations and semi-analytic techniques to follow the formation, the evolution and the chemical enrichment of galaxies in a A cold dark matter (ACDM) universe. We model the transport of metals between the stars, the cold gas in galaxies, the hot gas in dark matter haloes and the intergalactic gas outside virialized haloes. We have compared three different feedback schemes. The 'retention' model assumes that material reheated by supernova explosions is able to leave the galaxy, but not the dark matter halo. The 'ejection' model assumes that this material leaves the halo and is then reincorporated when structure collapses on larger scales. The 'wind' model uses prescriptions that are motivated by observations of local starburst galaxies. We require that our models reproduce the cluster galaxy luminosity function measured from the 2dF survey, the relations between stellar mass, gas mass and metallicity inferred from the new Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data, and the observed amount of metals in the intracluster medium (ICM). With suitable adjustment of the free parameters in the model, a reasonable fit to the observational results at redshift zero can be obtained for all three feedback schemes. All three predict that the chemical enrichment of the ICM occurs at high redshift: 60-80 per cent of the metals currently in the ICM were ejected at redshifts larger than 1, 35-60 per cent at redshifts larger than 2 and 20-45 per cent at redshifts larger than 3. Massive galaxies are important contributors to the chemical pollution: about half of the metals present today in the ICM were ejected by galaxies with baryonic masses larger than 10 10 h -1 M ○. . The observed decline in baryon fraction from rich clusters to galaxy groups is reproduced only in an 'extreme' ejection scheme, where material ejected from dark matter haloes is reincorporated on a time-scale comparable to the age of the Universe. Finally, we explore how the metal abundance in the intergalactic medium as a function of redshift can constrain how and when galaxies ejected their metals.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/37357acb060abad05f6bc17a4e39c56a64588e3e

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Citations in the corpus

The Buildup of the Red Sequence in Galaxy Clusters since z ∼ 0.8 (2004, unknown): “An alternative explanation has been proposed by Kauffmann & Charlot (1998, see also De Lucia et al. (2004)).”
The Assembly History of Field Spheroidals: Evolution of Mass-to-Light Ratios and Signatures of Recent Star Formation (2005, unknown): “Although the difference between the FP evolution of cluster and field spheroidals (Table 2) is in the sense expected by hierarchical models (Diaferio et al. 2001; De Lucia et al. 2004), quantitatively it is not as pronounced as expected (vanDokkum et al. 2001; Treu 2004).”
The build-up of the colour-magnitude relation in galaxy clusters since z ~ 0.8 (2006, methodology): “The luminous–to–faint ratio we measure for Coma is 0.32 ± 0.06.4 4 In De Lucia et al. (2004) we erroneously used a distance modulus equal to 35.16 (instead of 35.00 used here) corresponding to We have complemented our low redshift comparison sample with a sample of clusters selected from the SDSS.”
Metallicities and Physical Conditions in Star-forming Galaxies at z ~ 1.0-1.5 (2008, background): “A characterization of the evolution of chemical abundances for galaxies of different masses is therefore essential to a complete model of galaxy formation that includes the physics of baryons (De Lucia et al. 2004; Finlator & Dave 2007).”
NEW STRONG-LINE ABUNDANCE DIAGNOSTICS FOR H ii REGIONS: EFFECTS OF κ-DISTRIBUTED ELECTRON ENERGIES AND NEW ATOMIC DATA (2013, background): “These emission lines enable us to investigate the metallicity evolution of the universe as a whole (Nagamine et al. 2001; De Lucia et al. 2004; Kobayashi et al. 2007; Yuan et al. 2013).”
SIMULATION OF THE COSMIC EVOLUTION OF ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR HYDROGEN IN GALAXIES (2009, methodology): “Those masses are reasonably accurate as demonstrated by De Lucia et al. (2004) and Croton et al. (2006) through a comparison of the simulated stellar mass–metallicity relation to the empirical mass–metallicity relation obtained from 53,000 star forming galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey…”