First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: a tale of two elements - chemical evolution of magnesium and europium

By Jill P. Naiman, A. Pillepich, Volker Springel, E. Ramirez-Ruiz, P. Torrey, M. Vogelsberger, Rüdiger Pakmor, D. Nelson, F. Marinacci, L. Hernquist and 2 more. 2017

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The distribution of elements in galaxies provides a wealth of information about their production sites and their subsequent mixing into the interstellar medium. Here we investigate the distribution of elements within stars in the IllustrisTNG simulations. In particular, we analyze the abundance ratios of magnesium and europium in Milky Way-like galaxies from the TNG100 simulation (stellar masses ${\log} (M_\star / {\rm M}_\odot) \sim 9.7 - 11.2$). As abundances of magnesium and europium for individual stars in the Milky Way are observed across a variety of spatial locations and metallicities, comparison with the stellar abundances in our more than $850$ Milky Way-like galaxies provides stringent constraints on our chemical evolutionary methods. To this end we use the magnesium to iron ratio as a proxy for the effects of our SNII and SNIa metal return prescription, and a means to compare our simulated abundances to a wide variety of galactic observations. The europium to iron ratio tracks the rare ejecta from neutron star -- neutron star mergers, the assumed primary site of europium production in our models, which in turn is a sensitive probe of the effects of metal diffusion within the gas in our simulations. We find that europium abundances in Milky Way-like galaxies show no correlation with assembly history, present day galactic properties, and average galactic stellar population age. In general, we reproduce the europium to iron spread at low metallicities observed in the Milky Way, with the level of enhancement being sensitive to gas properties during redshifts $z \approx 2-4$. We show that while the overall normalization of [Eu/Fe] is susceptible to resolution and post-processing assumptions, the relatively large spread of [Eu/Fe] at low [Fe/H] when compared to that at high [Fe/H] is very robust.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7948ffd857e1b02d474b0474f58921674c86cd6c

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Citations in the corpus

The star formation activity of IllustrisTNG galaxies: main sequence, UVJ diagram, quenched fractions, and systematics (2018, background): “…star formation activity of galaxies produced in the state-ofthe-art cosmological magneto-hydrodynamical simulations of The Next Generation Illustris project (hereafter IllustrisTNG or TNG: Naiman et al. 2018; Marinacci et al. 2018; Springel et al. 2018; Pillepich et al. 2018b; Nelson et al. 2018a).”
Neutron Star Mergers Might Not Be the Only Source of r-process Elements in the Milky Way (2018, methodology): “…are mostly produced by massive stars and include elements such as O, Mg, Si, Ca, and Ti. in the early universe must have been rare and prolific compared to the production of α elements by standard CC SNe (e.g., Cescutti et al. 2015; Hirai et al. 2015; Wehmeyer et al. 2015; Naiman et al. 2018).”
The optical morphologies of galaxies in the IllustrisTNG simulation: a comparison to Pan-STARRS observations (2018, methodology): “The IllustrisTNG Project (Marinacci et al. 2018; Naiman et al. 2018; Nelson et al. 2018; Pillepich et al. 2018b; Springel et al. 2018) is a suite of magneto-hydrodynamic cosmological simulations run with the moving-mesh code AREPO (Springel 2010; Pakmor et al. 2011, 2016), featuring an updated…”
First results from the TNG50 simulation: galactic outflows driven by supernovae and black hole feedback (2019, methodology): “The IllustrisTNG project (Pillepich et al. 2018b; Naiman et al. 2018; Nelson et al. 2018a; Marinacci et al. 2018; Springel et al. 2018) is a recent addition to this class of simulation.”