X-ray coronae in simulations of disc galaxy formation

By Robert A. Crain, Ian G. McCarthy, Carlos S. Frenk, Tom Theuns, Joop Schaye. 2010

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The existence of X-ray luminous gaseous coronae around massive disc galaxies is a long-standing prediction of galaxy formation theory in the cold dark matter cosmogony. This prediction has garnered little observational support, with non-detections commonplace and detections for only a relatively small number of galaxies which are much less luminous than expected. We investigate the coronal properties of a large sample of bright, disc-dominated galaxies extracted from the GIMIC suite of cosmological hydrodynamic simulations recently presented by Crain et al. Remarkably, the simulations reproduce the observed scalings of X-ray luminosity with K-band luminosity and star formation rate (SFR) and, when account is taken of the density structure of the halo, with disc rotation velocity as well. Most of the star formation in the simulated galaxies (which have realistic stellar mass fractions) is fuelled by gas cooling from a quasi-hydrostatic hot corona. However, these coronae are more diffuse, and of a lower luminosity, than predicted by the analytic models of White & Frenk because of a substantial increase in entropy at z∼ 1–3. Both the removal of low entropy gas by star formation and energy injection from supernovae contribute to this increase in entropy, but the latter is dominant for halo masses M200≲ 1012.5 M⊙. Only a small fraction of the mass of the hot gas is outflowing as a wind but, because of its high density and metallicity, it contributes disproportionally to the X-ray emission. The bulk of the X-ray emission, however, comes from the diffuse quasi-hydrostatic corona which supplies the fuel for ongoing star formation in discs today. Future deep X-ray observations with high spectral resolution (e.g. with NeXT/ASTRO-H or IXO) should be able to map the velocity structure of the hot gas and test this fundamental prediction of current galaxy formation theory.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/862b5bf66d044e72f4f8db6c773bc1348baa024f

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Citations in the corpus

The origin of discs and spheroids in simulated galaxies (2011, background): “If Tmax exceeds 10 5.5 K, then in all likelihood it was accreted by gradual cooling from a shock-heated, nearly hydrostatic gas corona (see e.g. Crain et al. 2010; van de Voort et al. 2011).”
Why does the environmental influence on group and cluster galaxies extend beyond the virial radius (2012, background): “The simulations also reproduce the observed scalings of hot gas X-ray luminosity with K-band luminosity, star-formation rate and rotation velocity (Crain et al. 2010), as well as the properties of stellar haloes around Milky Way-mass disc galaxies (Font et al. 2011; McCarthy et al. 2012a).”
The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic, and Integrated Properties (2016, background): “Fang et al. (2013) favored a picture in which the corona is composed of adiabatic (isentropic) gas in hydrostatic equilibrium with the Galactic potential, in conflict with evidence that the Galactic halo is far from having a constant entropy profile (Crain et al. 2010, Miller & Bregman 2015).”
Making Galaxies in a Cosmological Context: The Need for Early Stellar Feedback (2012, background): “The origin of hot gas mass is coincident with the onset of star formation, indicating that stellar feedback could play a role in creating the hot halo; it may not only be accretion shocks as described in Toft et al. (2002) and Crain et al. (2010).”
A fundamental problem in our understanding of low-mass galaxy evolution (2012, methodology): “The GIMIC simulations have been shown to reproduce several properties of L⋆ galaxies, such as their X-ray to optical luminosity scaling relations (Crain et al. 2010), their stellar halo structure and dynamics (Font et al. 2011; McCarthy et al. 2012a) and their Tully-Fisher relation (McCarthy et al.…”
FORMING REALISTIC LATE-TYPE SPIRALS IN A ΛCDM UNIVERSE: THE ERIS SIMULATION (2011, result): “The flattened density profile we find is consistent with the results of much lower-resolution simulations by Crain et al. (2010), who identified the reason for the more extended gas distribution and weaker X-ray coronae in the entropy injection by SNe at z ∼ 1 − 3.”
Bimodality of low-redshift circumgalactic O VI in non-equilibrium EAGLE zoom simulations (2016, background): “The pressures of the T > 105.5 K phase generally follow the approximate magnitude and the slope (P ∝ M2/3200 ) of the model, although L∗ haloes and below have lower pressures interior to 0.3R200, which was also shown by Crain et al. (2010).”
The rates and modes of gas accretion on to galaxies and their gaseous haloes (2010, background): “The dominant form of accretion will thus depend on both the mass of the halo and accretion redshift (Birnboim & Dekel 2003; Katz et al. 2003; Kereš et al. 2005; Ocvirk, Pichon & Teyssier 2008; Brooks et al. 2009; Kereš et al. 2009a; Crain et al. 2010).”
Cosmological simulations of the formation of the stellar haloes around disc galaxies (2011, methodology): “We use the Galaxies-Intergalactic Medium Interaction Calculation (gimic) suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, which were carried out by the Virgo Consortium and are described in detail by Crain et al. (2009), hereafter C09 (see also Crain et al. 2010, hereafter C10).”
Gaseous Galaxy Halos (2012, background): “…to cosmological models of galaxy formation, as they predict it extends out to the virial radius and potentially hosts a large percentage of the galaxy’s baryons (White & Rees, 1978; Maller & Bullock, 2004; Fukugita & Peebles, 2006; Kaufmann et al., 2006; Sommer-Larsen, 2006; Crain et al., 2010).”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “Also several recent papers (e.g. Bogdán et al. 2013; Choi et al. 2014; Crain et al. 2010; Le Brun, McCarthy & Melin 2015; Le Brun et al. 2014,?) have shown that a proper prediction of the thermal X-ray halos of massive galaxies provides a stringent test of the correctness of any implemented…”
The Aquila comparison project: the effects of feedback and numerical methods on simulations of galaxy formation (2011, methodology): “A full description of the model can be found in Crain et al. (2009) and Schaye et al. (2010) and further applications of this model can be found in Crain et al. (2010), Cui et al. (2011), Deason et al. (2011), Font et al. (2011) and McCarthy et al. (2011).”
GeV OBSERVATIONS OF STAR-FORMING GALAXIES WITH THE FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE (2012, methodology): “4 GHz, (W Hz −1), (2) 61 We use the conversion factor proposed by Crain et al. (2010) for SFRs estimated from total IR luminosity: SFRChabrier= 0.79 SFRSalpeter. and HCN J=1-0 line luminosity indicating the quantity of dense molecular gas available to form new stars (Gao & Solomon 2004b), SFR(M⊙ yr…”