Hierarchical formation of bulgeless galaxies – II. Redistribution of angular momentum via galactic fountains

By C. Brook, G. Stinson, B. Gibson, R. Rovskar, James Wadsley, Thomas R. Quinn. 2011

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Within a fully cosmological hydrodynamical simulation, we form a galaxy which rotates at 140 km s −1 , and it is characterized by two loose spiral arms and a bar, indicative of a Hubble-type SBc/d galaxy. We show that our simulated galaxy has no classical bulge, with a pure disc profile at z = 1, well after the major merging activity has ended. A long-lived bar subsequently forms, resulting in the formation of a secularly formed ‘pseudo-’bulge, with the final bulge-to-total light ratio of 0.21. We show that the majority of gas which loses angular momentum and falls to the central region of the galaxy during the merging epoch is blown back into the hot halo, with much of it returning later to form stars in the disc. We propose that this mechanism of redistribution of angular momentum via a galactic fountain, when coupled with the results from our previous study which showed why gas outflows are biased to have low angular momentum, can solve the angular momentum/bulgeless disc problem of the cold dark matter paradigm.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/84c4572cb6622042e3e8e842ef1d7a3830f4ba0f

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Citations in the corpus

Thin disc, thick disc and halo in a simulated galaxy (2012, background): “We attribute this difference to the low stellar mass fractions of the accreted proto-galaxies/satellites in our simulations, which better match empirical relations between stellar and halo mass (Brook et al. 2012b).”
MaGICC discs: matching observed galaxy relationships over a wide stellar mass range (2012, background): “The conclusions of Brook et al. (2012) remain valid in the new simulations.”
Making Galaxies in a Cosmological Context: The Need for Early Stellar Feedback (2012, background): “That said, the fiducial simulation exhibits the same angular momentum distribution described in Brook et al. (2012a), so outflows still play a key feedback role in shaping the galaxy.”
A mass-dependent density profile for dark matter haloes including the influence of galaxy formation (2014, unknown): “Unlike previous generations of simulations, there is no catastrophic overcooling, no loss of angular momentum (Brook et al. 2011, 2012a), and the rotation curves do not have an inner peak, meaning that the mass proﬁles are appropriate for comparing to real galaxies.”
A BARYONIC SOLUTION TO THE MISSING SATELLITES PROBLEM (2012, background): “The model in Z12 has also been shown to create bulgeless dwarf disk galaxies (Governato et al. 2010) and smaller bulges in higher mass galaxies (Brook et al. 2012).”
Moving mesh cosmology: tracing cosmological gas accretion (2013, background): “That realistic disk morphologies are related to the angular momentum reservoir from which they form has also been found regardless of numerical technique, in the context of galactic fountain material (Brook et al. 2012) and cooling from hot coronae (Sales et al. 2012).”
Constraining sub-grid physics with high-redshift spatially-resolved metallicity distributions (2013, methodology): “Predicted present-day, stellar mass-weighted, radial [O/Fe] gradients for the MaGICC (Brook et al. 2012b) and MUGS (Stinson et al. 2010) realisations of simulationg1536, compared with that predicted by an analytical model of the Milky Way (SB09: Schönrich & Binney (2009)).”
The current status of galaxy formation (2012, background): “A wind is driven from the bulge where star formation is largely suppressed for sufficiently high feedback (Brook et al., 2012).”
Size evolution of normal and compact galaxies in the EAGLE simulation (2015, background): “This problem can be overcome by the inclusion of energetic feedback, which tends to expel the lowest angular momentum gas from the forming galaxy, while also regulating the stellar mass formed (e.g. Sales et al. 2010; Brook et al. 2011, 2012a).”
The impact of baryonic physics on the structure of dark matter haloes: the view from the FIRE cosmological simulations (2015, background): “Brook et al. (2012) showed that a large fraction of the gas that is expelled returns via a large-scale galactic fountain (see also Oppenheimer et al. 2010) to form stars at later times: this greatly increases the chance of outflows from the inner regions and further helps in core formation.”
ANGULAR MOMENTUM AND GALAXY FORMATION REVISITED (2012, background): “Other types of outflows may also occur, where gas is expelled outward but remains bound and falls inward again, as in a galactic fountain (e.g., Brook et al. 2012).”
The birth of a galaxy – II. The role of radiation pressure (2012, background): “They can self-enrich their environment (e.g. Wise et al. 2012), disrupt its starforming cloud (e.g. Draine & Woods 1991; Whalen et al. 2008), create realistic bulgeless disc galaxies, and possibly launch large-scale outflows (Governato et al. 2010; Brook et al. 2012).”
The neutral hydrogen content of galaxies in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations (2013, background): “Hence galaxy disks in SPH tend to be overly condensed (Torrey et al. 2012) barring the inclusion of strong feedback (Brook et al. 2012), which could affect the conversion of H i to H2 within the disk.”
Cosmological Simulations with Self-Interacting Dark Matter I: Constant Density Cores and Substructure (2012, result): “In principle, the expulsion of gas from galaxies can result in lower dark matter densities compared to dissipationless simulations, and thus bring CDM models in line with observations (Governato et al. 2010; Oh et al. 2011; Pontzen & Governato 2011; Brook et al. 2012; Governato et al. 2012).”
SDSS IV MaNGA – metallicity and nitrogen abundance gradients in local galaxies (2017, background): “In these galaxies the shallower gravitational potential well may favour the launching of large scale galactic winds, reducing the amount of low angular momentum gas that turns into stars in the central regions of the disc (Brook et al. 2012).”
The origin of discs and spheroids in simulated galaxies (2011, background): “Large f hot favours disc formation: gas shock-heated into a nearly hydrostatic corona of hot gas is forced to homogenize its rotational properties before accretion, providing the forming galaxy with a gradual supply of gas that shares the same spin axis (see e.g. Brook et al. 2012).”
Physical Models of Galaxy Formation in a Cosmological Framework (2014, background): “Stellar-driven winds preferentially remove low angular momentum gas from the centers of galaxies, and deposit it in the disk outskirts after re-torquing in the halo (Brook et al. 2012, Übler et al. 2014).”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “The outflow supresses the formation of stellar bulges from the low angular momentum gas at high redshift and enriches the circum-galactic medium with metals (Brook et al. 2012, Christensen et al. 2016, Governato et al. 2010, Marinacci et al. 2014).”
The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: calibration of subgrid physics and model variations (2015, background): “…curves that are, for particular galaxy masses, consistent with observational measurements (e.g. Governato et al. 2004; Okamoto et al. 2005; Sales et al. 2010; Guedes et al. 2011; Brook et al. 2012; McCarthy et al. 2012; Aumer et al. 2013; Munshi et al. 2013; Marinacci, Pakmor & Springel 2014).”