The dark nemesis of galaxy formation : why hot haloes trigger black hole growth and bring star formation to an end

By Richard G. Bower, Joop Schaye, Carlos S. Frenk, Tom Theuns, Matthieu Schaller, Robert A. Crain, Stuart McAlpine Icc, D. University, L. Observatory, Liverpool John Moore's University. 2016

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Galaxies fall into two clearly distinct types: `blue-sequence' galaxies that are rapidly forming young stars, and `red-sequence' galaxies in which star formation has almost completely ceased. Most galaxies more massive than $3\times10^{10} M_\odot$ follow the red-sequence while less massive central galaxies lie on the blue sequence. We show that these sequences are created by a competition between star formation-driven outflows and gas accretion on to the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center. We develop a simple analytic model for this interaction. In galaxies less massive than $3\times10^{10} M_\odot$, young stars and supernovae drive a high entropy outflow that is more buoyant that any diffuse corona. The outflow balances the rate of gas inflow, preventing high gas densities building up in the central regions. More massive galaxies, however, are surrounded by a hot corona. We argue that above a halo mass of $\sim 10^{12} M_\odot$, the supernova-driven outflow is no longer buoyant and star formation is unable to prevent the build up of gas in the central regions. This triggers a strongly non-linear response from the black hole. Its accretion rate rises rapidly, heating the galaxy's corona, disrupting the incoming supply of cool gas and starving the galaxy of the fuel for star formation. The host galaxy makes a transition to the red sequence, and further growth predominantly occurs through galaxy mergers. We show that the analytic model provides a good description of galaxy evolution in the EAGLE hydrodynamic simulations, and demonstrate that, so long as star formation-driven outflows are present, the transition mass scale is almost independent of subgrid parameter choice. The transition mass disappears entirely, however, if star formation driven outflows are absent.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e2f34e191d6bddac576ec7e24d9af9cd6c7b943

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Citations in the corpus

Blossoms from black hole seeds: properties and early growth regulated by supernova feedback (2016, background): “Bower et al. (2017) study the build-up of the red (massive galaxies of > few 1010M , quiescent) and blue (less massive galaxies, star-forming) sequence.”
Supermassive black holes and their feedback effects in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, background): “This trend shows that the choice of comparably massive SMBH seeds within the model causes accretion at considerable rates after seeding in particular at high redshift, which is different compared to the scenario described in Bower et al. (2017).”
Simulating galaxy formation with the IllustrisTNG model (2017, background): “A somewhat similar effect has been seen in the Eagle model (Bower et al. 2017) where it was attributed to the removal of gas from small galaxies due to stellar feedback.”
simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, result): “Finally, results from EAGLE are shown as the magenta dotted line.”
Black holes on FIRE: stellar feedback limits early feeding of galactic nuclei (2017, background): “…star-formation-driven kinetic winds (Costa et al. 2014) or delayed cooling thermal supernova feedback (Dubois et al. 2015; Bonoli et al. 2016; Bower et al. 2017; Habouzit, Volonteri & Dubois 2017; Prieto et al. 2017) also find suppressed ṀBH in low-mass galaxies, in qualitative agreement…”