The birth of a galaxy – II. The role of radiation pressure

By John H. Wise, Tom Abel, Matthew J. Turk, M. Norman, Britton D. Smith. 2012

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Massive stars provide feedback that shapes the interstellar medium of galaxies at all redshifts and their resulting stellar populations. Here we present three adaptive mesh refinement radiation hydrodynamics simulations that illustrate the impact of momentum transfer from ionising radiation to the absorbing gas on star formation in high-redshift dwarf galaxies. Momentum transfer is calculated by solving the radiative transfer equation with a ray tracing algorithm that is adaptive in spatial and angular coordinates. We find that momentum input partially affects star formation by increasing the turbulent support to a three-dimensional rms velocity equal to the circular velocity of early haloes. Compared to a calculation that neglects radiation pressure, the star formation rate is decreased by a factor of five to 1.8 × 10 −2 M⊙ yr −1 in a dwarf galaxy with a dark matter and stellar mass of 2.0 × 10 8 M⊙ and 4.5 × 10 5 M⊙, respectively, when radiation pressure is included. Its mean metallicity of 10 −2.1 Z⊙ is consistent with the observed dwarf galaxy luminosity-metallicity relation. However, what one may naively expect from the calculation without radiation pressure, the central region of the galaxy overcools and produces a compact, metalrich stellar population with an average metallicity of 0.3 Z⊙, indicative of an incorrect physical recipe. In addition to photo-heating in H ii regions, radiation pressure further drives dense gas from star forming regions, so supernovae feedback occurs in a warmer and more diffuse medium, launching metal-rich outflows. Capturing this aspect and a temporal separation between the start of radiative and supernova feedback are numerically important in the modeling of galaxies to avoid the “overcooling problem”. We estimate that dust in early low-mass galaxies is unlikely to aid in momentum transfer from radiation to the gas.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/631f7e1068d5f21216d3f72a18a3666bb32ca327

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 Instrumentation

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

TOWARD A COMPLETE ACCOUNTING OF ENERGY AND MOMENTUM FROM STELLAR FEEDBACK IN GALAXY FORMATION SIMULATIONS (2012, methodology): “…is nature, acting only in the local resolution elements surrounding young stars, and therefore does not account for continuous acceleration of gas far outside of galactic disks, as recently proposed by Murray et al. (2011), and modelled in the radiative transfer simulations by Wise et al. (2012).”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “A full radiation transfer treatment of ionizing radiation from massive stars in galaxy scale simulations is technically challenging (see e.g. Wise et al. 2012 for single scattering).”
ENZO: AN ADAPTIVE MESH REFINEMENT CODE FOR ASTROPHYSICS (2013, methodology): “At the end of their main-sequence lifetimes, explosion energies, ejected gas mass, and ejected metal are calculated using a variety of sources that depend on the mass of the star, and are described in detail in Section 3.2.1 of Wise et al. (2012).”
The birth of a galaxy – III. Propelling reionization with the faintest galaxies (2014, background): “The filtering mass correspondingly increases from 107 M at z = 15 to 108 M at z = 7 (see Wise et al. 2012b).”
Radiative feedback and the low efficiency of galaxy formation in low-mass haloes at high redshift (2013, background): “The code also includes the later effects of Type-Ia supernova and stellar mass loss, and it follows the metal enrichment of the ISM.”
Feedback-regulated star formation and escape of LyC photons from mini-haloes during reionization (2016, methodology): “The fact that the simulated galaxies are very metal-poor (∼ 0.003Z ) suggests that our results do not suffer from the overcooling problem, as it usually leads to significantly higher metallicities of >∼ 0.1Z (Wise et al. 2012a).”
FIRE-2 simulations: physics versus numerics in galaxy formation (2017, background): “…environments), and generate galactic chimneys and super-bubbles c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 that generate fountains and super-winds (e.g. Krumholz et al. 2007, 2011; Offner et al. 2009, 2011; Harper-Clark & Murray 2011; Bate 2012; Wise et al. 2012; Pawlik et al. 2013; Muratov et al. 2013).”
Galaxies on FIRE (Feedback In Realistic Environments): stellar feedback explains cosmologically inefficient star formation (2013, background): “…these have necessarily been restricted to very small systems, either single molecular clouds/star clusters (e.g. Krumholz et al. 2007, 2011; Offner et al. 2009, 2011; HarperClark & Murray 2011; Bate 2012), or the “first stars” (e.g. Wise et al. 2012; Pawlik et al. 2013; Muratov et al. 2013).”
GALAXY PROPERTIES AND UV ESCAPE FRACTIONS DURING THE EPOCH OF REIONIZATION: RESULTS FROM THE RENAISSANCE SIMULATIONS (2016, methodology): “For the Rarepeak simulation, we use the time-dependent LW optically thin radiation background used in Wise et al. (2012b), which is based on the semi-analytical model of Wise & Abel (2005), updated with the seven-year WMAP parameters and optical depth to Thomson scattering.”