Simulating galactic outflows with thermal supernova feedback

By Claudio Dalla Vecchia, Joop Schaye. 2012

380 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cosmological simulations make use of sub-grid recipes for the implementation of galactic winds driven by massive stars because direct injection of supernova energy in thermal form leads to strong radiative losses, rendering the feedback inefficient. We argue that the main cause of the catastrophic cooling is a mismatch between the mass of the gas in which the energy is injected and the mass of the parent stellar population. Because too much mass is heated, the temperatures are too low and the cooling times too short. We use analytic arguments to estimate, as a function of the gas density and the numerical resolution, the minimum heating temperature that is required for the injected thermal energy to be efficiently converted into kinetic energy. We then propose and test a stochastic implementation of thermal feedback that uses this minimum temperature increase as an input parameter and that can be employed in both particle-based and grid-based codes. We use smoothed particle hydrodynamic simulations to test the method on models of isolated disc galaxies in dark matter haloes with total mass 1010 and 1012 h−1 M⊙. The thermal feedback strongly suppresses the star formation rate and can drive massive, large-scale outflows without the need to turn off radiative cooling temporarily. In accordance with expectations derived from analytic arguments, for sufficiently high resolution the results become insensitive to the imposed temperature jump and also agree with high-resolution simulations employing kinetic feedback.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48079c9a1df18f7e810a73d9fc04a9afaf62174a

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Citations in the corpus

The eagle simulations of galaxy formation: Public release of halo and galaxy catalogues (2015, methodology): “The modifications to the SPH method are collectively referred to as anarchy (Dalla Vecchia, (in prep.)”
The physics of galactic winds driven by active galactic nuclei (2012, methodology): “…suppress cooling in order to avoid efficient energy radiation when the ISM is not properly resolved (for a review, see Kay et al. 2002; Dalla Vecchia & Schaye 2012 discuss alternatives), and other techniques have also been developed in the context of AGN feedback (e.g., Sijacki et al. 2007;…”
A model for cosmological simulations of galaxy formation physics: multi-epoch validation (2013, methodology): “This approach is similar to the implementation of Dalla Vecchia & Schaye (2008) with the exception of the way in which “excess energy/mass loading” is handled.”
The First Billion Years project: the impact of stellar radiation on the co-evolution of Populations II and III (2012, methodology): “More details about the star formation prescription, and the motivation for it, can be found in Schaye & Dalla Vecchia (2008).”
Evolution of galaxy stellar masses and star formation rates in the eagle simulations (2014, methodology): “Math., 4, 389 White S. D. M., Frenk C. S., 1991, ApJ, 379, 52 White S. D. M., Rees M. J., 1978, MNRAS, 183, 341 White C. E., Somerville R. S., Ferguson H. C., 2015, ApJ, 799, 201 Wiersma R. P. C., Schaye J., Smith B. D., 2009a, MNRAS, 393, 99 Wiersma R. P. C., Schaye J., Theuns T., Dalla Vecchia C.,”
(Star)bursts of FIRE: observational signatures of bursty star formation in galaxies (2015, methodology): “Large-volume cosmological simulations of galaxy formation must rely on ‘sub-resolution’ models (Springel & Hernquist 2003; Oppenheimer & Davé 2006; Scannapieco et al. 2012; Dalla Vecchia & Schaye 2012) because the sub-kiloparsec structure of the ISM is not resolved.”
A case study of hurdle and generalized additive models in astronomy: the escape of ionizing radiation (2018, methodology): “…Maio et al. 2011; Johnson, Dalla Vecchia & Khochfar 2013) with molecular cooling functions for H2 and HD, a thermal SN II feedback model (Dalla Vecchia & Schaye 2012), and a time-step limiter algorithm to preserve the concordance of feedback methods (Durier & Dalla Vecchia 2012; Schaller et…”
Physical Models of Galaxy Formation in a Cosmological Framework (2014, methodology): “Dalla Vecchia C, Schaye J. 2008.”
Towards a realistic population of simulated galaxy groups and clusters (2013, background): “Feedback from SNe is implemented using the local kinetic wind model of Dalla Vecchia & Schaye (2008) with the initial mass-loading factor and the initial wind velocity chosen to be respectively η = 2 and vw = 600 km s −1.”
How Stellar Feedback Simultaneously Regulates Star Formation and Drives Outflows (2015, background): “…cooling for some fixed time interval (e.g.Stinson et al. 2006, 2013) or store the supernova feedback energy until it is guaranteed to generate a blastwave, alb it on artificially large (but numerically resolved) scales (e.g.Dalla Vecchia & Schaye 2012; Crain et al. 2015; Schaye et al. 2015).”
The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: the importance of the hydrodynamics scheme (2015, methodology): “Metals from supernovae and AGB stars are injected into the interstellar medium (ISM) following the model of Wiersma et al. (2009b) and stellar feedback is implemented by the stochastic injection of thermal energy into the gas as described in Dalla Vecchia & Schaye (2012).”
Black hole evolution – I. Supernova-regulated black hole growth (2015, background): “SN feedback that is an important driver of gas-mass loss in dwarf galaxies (e.g. Springel & Hernquist 2003; Dubois & Teyssier 2008; Dalla Vecchia & Schaye 2008, 2012; Hopkins et al. 2014) also turns dark matter (DM) cusps into cores (Gnedin & Zhao 2002; Mashchenko et al. 2006; Pontzen & Governato 20”
The First Billion Years project: the escape fraction of ionizing photons in the epoch of reionization (2015, methodology): “We model the mechanical SN feedback by injecting thermal energy in the neighbouring particles (Dalla Vecchia & Schaye 2012).”
Bimodality of low-redshift circumgalactic O VI in non-equilibrium EAGLE zoom simulations (2016, methodology): “Collectively, these updates are referred to as “Anarchy” (Dalla Vecchia, in prep.”
The formation and assembly history of the Milky Way revealed by its globular cluster population (2018, background): “…star formation within gas with density above a metallicity-dependent threshold (Schaye 2004; Schaye & Dalla Vecchia 2008), stellar feedback (Dalla Vecchia & Schaye 2012), metal enrichment (Wiersma et al. 2009b), the growth of supermassive black holes by gas accretion and merging (Springel et al.…”
The BAHAMAS project: Calibrated hydrodynamical simulations for large-scale structure cosmology (2016, background): “Gas exceeding this density threshold is available for star formation (implemented stochastically), at a pressure-dependent rate that reproduces the observed Kennicutt-Schmidt law by construction (see Schaye & Dalla Vecchia 2008).”
The cosmic baryon cycle and galaxy mass assembly in the FIRE simulations (2016, background): “…locally while gas cooling is temporarily disabled to avoid radiative losses (Stinson et al. 2006; Christensen et al. 2016), and the accumulation of feedback energy until individual thermal injections can be efficiently converted into kinetic energy (Dalla Vecchia & Schaye 2012; Schaye et al. 2015).”
The chosen few: the low-mass haloes that host faint galaxies (2014, methodology): “The model includes stellar evolution (Wiersma et al. 2009) and stochastic thermal supernova feedback (Dalla Vecchia & Schaye 2012), as well as blackhole growth and AGN feedback (Rosas-Guevara et al. 2013; Booth & Schaye 2009; Springel et al. 2005).”
Colours and luminosities of z = 0.1 galaxies in the eagle simulation (2015, methodology): “Motivation and tests of this ‘ANARCHY’ version of SPH are presented in Dalla Vecchia (in preparation, see also appendix A of S15), whereas Schaller et al (in preparation) examine the effects of using this modified version of SPH on galaxy properties.”