Resolving the Formation of Protogalaxies. II. Central Gravitational Collapse

By John H. Wise, Matthew J. Turk, Tom Abel. 2007

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Numerous cosmological hydrodynamic studies have addressed the formation of galaxies. Here we choose to study the first stages of galaxy formation, including nonequilibrium atomic primordial gas cooling, gravity, and hydrodynamics. Using initial conditions appropriate for the concordance cosmological model of structure formation, we perform two adaptive mesh refinement simulations of ~108 M☉ galaxies at high redshift. The calculations resolve the Jeans length at all times with more than 16 cells and capture over 14 orders of magnitude in length scales. In both cases, the dense, 105 solar mass, one parsec central regions are found to contract rapidly and have turbulent Mach numbers up to 4. Despite the ever decreasing Jeans length of the isothermal gas, we only find one site of fragmentation during the collapse. However, rotational secular bar instabilities transport angular momentum outward in the central parsec as the gas continues to collapse and lead to multiple nested unstable fragments with decreasing masses down to sub-Jupiter mass scales. Although these numerical experiments neglect star formation and feedback, they clearly highlight the physics of turbulence in gravitationally collapsing gas. The angular momentum segregation seen in our calculations plays an important role in theories that form supermassive black holes from gaseous collapse.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/800314e8145473ee6abe0f87b4f3559bdddfdb49

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Citations in the corpus

What drives the growth of black holes (2011, background): “Detailed hydrodynamic simulations have explored this process (e.g., Wise et al., 2008; Regan & Haehnelt, 2009; Shang et al., 2010; Johnson et al., 2011) and indicate that supermassive stars at the centers of halos can, in principle, accrete up to a few ×105 M over ∼2 Myr (Johnson et al., 2011).”
SUPER-CRITICAL GROWTH OF MASSIVE BLACK HOLES FROM STELLAR-MASS SEEDS (2014, background): “Even in the absence of star formation, thick, turbulent pressuresupported disks are often seen in simulations of early protogalaxies (Wise et al. 2008).”
Black hole formation in the early Universe (2013, background): “The overall halo properties are in accordance with previous studies (Abel et al. 2002; Wise et al. 2008; Turk, Abel & O’Shea 2009; Turk et al. 2012).”
Small-scale dynamo action during the formation of the first stars and galaxies - I. The ideal MHD limit (2010, methodology): “Radial profiles of the turbulent velocity in the first galaxies indicate that there are some random fluctuations, but the orderof-magnitude of the turbulent velocity does not change during the collapse (Wise & Abel 2007; Greif et al. 2008; Wise et al. 2008).”
CLASH: THREE STRONGLY LENSED IMAGES OF A CANDIDATE z ≈ 11 GALAXY (2012, background): “470 million years old (Wise & Abel 2007; Wise et al. 2008; Greif et al. 2008, 2010; and for recent reviews, see Bromm & Yoshida 2011 and Dunlop 2012).”
Galaxy formation theory (2010, background): “…et al. 2008; O’Shea and Norman 2007, 2008; Harris et al. 2007; Stacy and Bromm 2007) may be crucialfor understanding how this population of galaxies grows (Tegmark et al. 1997; Ricotti et al. 2001; Wise and Abel 2007a,b; Greif et al. 2008; Wise and Abel 2008b; Wise et al. 2008; Bromm et al. 2009).”
An analytic model of angular momentum transport by gravitational torques: from galaxies to massive black holes (2010, background): “Recently, numerical simulations using a variety of techniques have been able to follow the inflow of gas to smaller scales in galaxies (Escala et al. 2004; Escala 2007; Mayer et al. 2007; Wise et al. 2008; Levine et al. 2008; Hopkins & Quataert 2010a).”
Formation of supermassive black holes (2010, background): “Wise et al (2008) and Regan and Haehnelt (2009) have performed some idealized numerical simulations of the evolution of gaseous discs in haloes with suitable characteristics.”
Formation of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds (2016, methodology): “The numerical experiments employing a Jeans resolution of 4 cells did not observe any fragmentation (Bromm & Loeb 2003; Wise et al. 2008; Regan & Haehnelt 2009; Prieto et al. 2013; Latif et al. 2013a) while the simulations employing both higher Jeans (64 cells per Jeans length) as well as spatial…”