Galaxies–intergalactic medium interaction calculation – I. Galaxy formation as a function of large-scale environment

By Robert A. Crain, Tom Theuns, Claudio Dalla Vecchia, V. Eke, Carlos S. Frenk, Adrian Jenkins, S. Kay, J. Pearce, Joop Schaye, Volker Springel and 7 more. 2009

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

[Abridged] We present the first results of hydrodynamical simulations that follow the formation of galaxies to z=0 in spherical regions of radius ~20 Mpc/h drawn from the Millennium Simulation. The regions have overdensities that deviate by (-2, -1, 0, +1, +2)sigma from the cosmic mean, where sigma is the rms mass fluctuation on a scale of ~20Mpc/h at z=1.5. The simulations have mass resolution of up to 10^6 Msun/h, cover the entire range of large-scale environments and allow extrapolation of statistics to the entire 500 (Mpc/h)^3 Millennium volume. They include gas cooling, photoheating from an ionising background, SNe feedback and winds, but no AGN. We find that the specific SFR density at z <~ 10 varies systematically from region to region by up to an order of magnitude, but the global value, averaged over all volumes, reproduces observational data. Massive, compact galaxies, similar to those observed in the GOODS fields, form in the overdense regions as early as z=6, but do not appear in the underdense regions until z~3. These environmental variations are not caused by a dependence of the star formation properties on environment, but rather by a strong variation of the halo mass function from one environment to another, with more massive haloes forming preferentially in the denser regions. At all epochs, stars form most efficiently in haloes of circular velocity ~ 250 km/s. However, the star formation history exhibits a form of "downsizing" (even in the absence of AGN): the stars comprising massive galaxies at z=0 have mostly formed by z=1-2, whilst those comprising smaller galaxies typically form at later times. However, additional feedback is required to limit star formation in massive galaxies at late times.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/83cced3fde2fd1fb371db8a46ea39efbcadbf481

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

Citations in the corpus

Galaxy morphology and star formation in the Illustris Simulation at z = 0 (2015, background): “By including significant feedback from supernovae, massive star formation, and supermassive black holes, the realism of resulting galaxy models has continued to improve (e.g., Crain et al. 2009; Guedes et al. 2011; Ceverino et al. 2014; Cen 2014).”
Moving mesh cosmology: the hydrodynamics of galaxy formation (2011, methodology): “We note that this standard formulation of SPH has also been typically employed in state-of-the-art cosmological SPH calculations (e.g. Crain et al. 2009; Di Matteo et al. 2012).”
X-ray coronae in simulations of disc galaxy formation (2010, methodology): “In this paper, we have used the Galaxies-Intergalactic Medium Interaction Calculation (Crain et al. 2009, C09) to investigate this challenge to the standard picture of galaxy formation using altogether different techniques.”
Moving mesh cosmology: numerical techniques and global statistics (2011, background): “There have also been numerous studies that focused on the formation of a representative galaxy population (e.g. Pearce et al. 1999; Murali et al. 2002; Weinberg et al. 2004; Nagamine et al. 2005; Crain et al. 2009).”
Shaping the galaxy stellar mass function with supernova- and AGN-driven winds (2012, background): “Thus, hydrodynamical simulations of full galaxy populations (e.g. Crain et al. 2009; Schaye et al. 2010; Vogelsberger et al. 2011) usually employ simplified sub-resolution models to capture star formation and associated feedback processes in an approximate way, with parameterizations that are…”
Galaxy formation theory (2010, background): “This may indicate, as expected on theoretical grounds (Crain et al., 2009), that the Milky Way is in the transition mass range between purely cold and purely hot accretion.”
The physics driving the cosmic star formation history (2009, methodology): “Previous numerical studies of the cosmic SFH have mostly used the instantaneous recycling approximation (but see e.g. Oppenheimer & Davé 2008; Crain et al. 2009), which means that star particles eject all the products of stellar evolution immediately following their formation.”
The properties of the star-forming interstellar medium at z = 0.84-2.23 from HiZELS : mapping the internal dynamics and metallicity gradients in high-redshift disc galaxies. (2012, methodology): “6 we also compare the zero-point evolution in the Tully– Fisher relation to that from semi-analytic models from Bower et al. (2006) and Dutton et al. (2011) and the cosmological hydrodynamic Galaxies–Intergalactic Medium Interaction Calculation (GIMIC; Crain et al. 2009).”
The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments (2014, methodology): “McCarthy et al. (2012) found that for the GIMIC simulations the maximum circular velocities are nearly always reached within two effective radii for M∗>∼ 10 9.5 M , and should therefore be easily accessible to the observations, but it is possible that for smaller masses the observations underestimat”
The masses and density profiles of halos in a LCDM galaxy formation simulation (2014, methodology): “Sawala et al. (2013) proposed a fitting function to the ratio of M200 in simulations with and without baryons from the GIMIC project (Crain et al. 2009).”
Galactic accretion and the outer structure of galaxies in the CDM model (2013, methodology): “In the same panel we compare with the GIMIC SPH simulations (Crain et al. 2009), the only other large cosmological simulation of stellar haloes in thisM200 range (though see also Croft et al. 2009), with a particle mass 7.7× larger than Millennium II and the same force softening length.”
Colours and luminosities of z = 0.1 galaxies in the eagle simulation (2015, methodology): “The subgrid modules of EAGLE are partly inspired by the OWLS and GIMIC simulations (Crain et al. 2009; Schaye et al. 2010).”
Introducing the Illustris Project: simulating the coevolution of dark and visible matter in the Universe (2014, background): “Hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation have become more prominent over the last several years, and a significant number of results have been published from them (e.g. Crain et al. 2009; Schaye et al. 2010; Kannan et al. 2013; Puchwein, Baldi & Springel 2013).”
Evolution of galaxy stellar masses and star formation rates in the eagle simulations (2014, methodology): “The baryonic subgrid physics included in these simulations is broadly based on that used for the OWLS (Schaye et al. 2010) and GIMIC (Crain et al. 2009) projects, although many improvements, in particular to the stellar feedback scheme and black hole growth, have been implemented.”
NEW CONSTRAINTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR-TO-DARK MATTER CONNECTION: A COMBINED ANALYSIS OF GALAXY–GALAXY LENSING, CLUSTERING, AND STELLAR MASS FUNCTIONS FROM z = 0.2 to z = 1 (2011, background): “…(e.g., Bower et al. 2006; Croton et al. 2006; Somerville et al. 2008; Zehavi et al. 2011a) and hydrodynamical simulations (Kereš et al. 2005, 2009; Crain et al. 2009; Brooks et al. 2009; Gabor et al. 2011; Agertz et al. 2011) that aim to disentangle the relative contributions of such…”
The origin of discs and spheroids in simulated galaxies (2011, methodology): “None of the results we discuss here show significant dependence on which region we consider, so we will group the 100 galaxies together without making distinction regarding the GIMIC run where they were identified.”
Simulating galaxy formation with the IllustrisTNG model (2017, methodology): “In fact, the shape of the galaxy stellar mass function without the redshift-dependent velocity scaling interestingly resembles the early findings from the GIMIC simulation (Crain et al. 2009).”
Star formation sustained by gas accretion (2014, result): “Similar results are provided by, e.g., White & Frenk (1991), Hernquist & Springel (2003), Somerville et al. (2008), Crain et al. (2009), and Choi & Nagamine (2009).”
Gas expulsion by quasar-driven winds as a solution to the overcooling problem in galaxy groups and clusters (2010, background): “…formation and evolution of galaxy groups is crucial to solving the general problem of galaxy formation, as groups contain most of the galaxies in the Universe at the present day (e.g. Mulchaey 2000), and a large fraction of the universal stellar mass is formed in groups (e.g. Crain et al. 2009).”
Bent by baryons: the low-mass galaxy-halo relation (2014, result): “Confirming results of our previous work (Sawala et al. 2013) based on the Gimic simulations (Crain et al. 2009), we find that the average mass of low-mass halos is reduced by up to ∼ 33% relative to their counterparts in the DMO simulation.”