Modelling feedback from stars and black holes in galaxy mergers

By Volker Springel, T. Di Matteo, L. Hernquist. 2004

1,706 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe techniques for incorporating feedback from star formation and black hole (BH) accretion into simulations of isolated and merging galaxies. At present, the details of these processes cannot be resolved in simulations on galactic scales. Our basic approach therefore involves forming coarse-grained representations of the properties of the interstellar medium (ISM) and BH accretion starting from basic physical assumptions, so that the impact of these effects can be included on resolved scales. We illustrate our method using a multiphase description of star-forming gas. Feedback from star formation pressurizes highly overdense gas, altering its effective equation of state (EOS). We show that this allows the construction of stable galaxy models with much larger gas fractions than possible in earlier numerical work. We extend the model by including a treatment of gas accretion onto central supermassive BHs in galaxies. Assuming thermal coupling of a small fraction of the bolometric luminosity of accreting BHs to the surrounding gas, we show how this feedback regulates the growth of BHs. In gas-rich mergers of galaxies, we observe a complex interplay between starbursts and central active galactic nuclei (AGN) activity when the tidal interaction triggers intense nuclear inflows of gas. Once an accreting supermassive BH has grown to a critical size, feedback terminates its further growth and expels gas from the central region in a powerful quasar-driven wind. Our simulation methodology is therefore able to address the coupled processes of gas dynamics, star formation and BH accretion during the formation of galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b157f1cd31c2175871f2ef5f99b1e9a1fec6c6b

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Citations in the corpus

A Unified, Merger-driven Model of the Origin of Starbursts, Quasars, the Cosmic X-Ray Background, Supermassive Black Holes, and Galaxy Spheroids (2005, methodology): “In order to investigate the consequences of supernova feedback over a range of conditions, we employ the scheme of Springel et al. (2005b), introducing a parameterqEOS to interpolate between an isothermal equation of state (qEOS = 0) and the full multiphase equation of state (qEOS= 1) described…”
Towards a more realistic population of bright spiral galaxies in cosmological simulations (2013, background): “Apart from supernovae, AGN (e.g. Springel et al. 2005) and cosmic rays (Uhlig et al. 2012) have been considered as possible sources of feedback.”
ACCRETION ONTO THE FIRST STELLAR-MASS BLACK HOLES (2007, background): “A typical approach is that described by Springel et al. (2005), where some fraction of the rest-mass energy accreted onto the black hole is deposited as thermal energy within a finite volume of surrounding matter as an additional term in the energy equation.”
The X-Ray Spectral Properties of SCUBA Galaxies (2005, background): “Shortly after the completion of our study sophisticated hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy major mergers, taking into account the growth of both the black hole and stellar components, were published (e.g., Di Matteo et al. 2005; Springel et al. 2005).”
A Close Look at Star Formation around Active Galactic Nuclei (2007, methodology): “It is also used to modulate star formation (at least on global scales) in semianalyticmodels of galaxy evolution (Granato et al. 2004; Springel et al. 2005).”
On the influence of ram-pressure stripping on the star formation of simulated spiral galaxies (2008, methodology): “The initial conditions were built according to Springel et al. (2005), based on the analytical work of Mo et al. (1998).”
Observations of feedback from radio-quiet quasars – II. Kinematics of ionized gas nebulae (2013, background): “Numerical simulations of galaxy formation show that properties of massive galaxies are most successfully reproduced when gas is physically removed from the host galaxy by the quasar-driven wind (Springel et al. 2005; Hopkins et al. 2006; Novak, Ostriker & Ciotti 2011).”
HST WFC3/IR OBSERVATIONS OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS HOST GALAXIES AT z ∼ 2: SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES GROW IN DISK GALAXIES (2010, background): “…AGN host galaxies with disk-like light profiles is difficult to reconcile with the expectation of black holes growing jointly with stellar bulges during special phases of their evolution, such as major mergers envisioned in many simulations (e.g., Springel et al. 2005; Hopkins et al. 2005, 2008).”
The Evolution of the MBH-σ Relation (2005, methodology): “Springel et al. (2005a) calculated the role of active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback in the reddening spheroids formed in mergers by truncating residual star formation.”
Deep Spitzer 24 μm COSMOS Imaging. I. The Evolution of Luminous Dusty Galaxies—Confronting the Models (2009, methodology): “Based on the now-popular cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm of structure formation (Springel et al. 2005) these models compute the evolution of the stellar content of galaxies from the hierarchical assembly of dark matter haloes, using detailed simulations to account for a variety of physical…”
Introducing the Illustris Project: simulating the coevolution of dark and visible matter in the Universe (2014, methodology): “…different types of merger trees, for example, using an extended and updated version of LHaloTree (also used for the Millennium simulations; Springel et al. 2005b), and ROCKSTAR (Behroozi, Wechsler & Wu 2013a), and the newly developed SubLink code (Rodriguez-Gomez et al., in preparation).”
The MassiveBlack-II simulation: The evolution of haloes and galaxies to z ~ 0 (2014, methodology): “…Medium Interaction Calculation (GIMIC) (which include gas, dark matter, star formation and feedback) and the DMO simulations (Crain et al. 2009) which were performed by resimulating at higher resolution an 18 h−1 Mpc spherical region of the Millennium simulation (Springel et al. 2005b).”
The formation of disc galaxies in high-resolution moving-mesh cosmological simulations (2013, methodology): “This is already a significant complication for strong supernova-driven winds but is especially evident for AGN feedback (Springel et al. 2005b).”
Introducing the Illustris Project: the evolution of galaxy populations across cosmic time (2014, methodology): “We determine the cosmic variance sensitivity of those quantities utilizing an estimate of the cosmic variance of the DM halo mass function that we extract from the Millennium simulation1 (Springel et al. 2005b).”
Vertical disc heating in Milky Way-sized galaxies in a cosmological context (2015, background): “Black Holes are seeded, and grow through gas accretion and merger processes based on the model introduced in Springel et al. (2005).”
The Kinematic Structure of Merger Remnants (2006, methodology): “Hence, the methods used here are identical to, and also described in, several related works (Cox et al. 2006; Di Matteo et al. 2005; Hopkins et al. 2005a, 2006a, 2005b,c, 2006b,c, 2005d; Lidz et al. 2006; Robertson et al. 2006a, 2005, 2006b; Springel et al. 2005a,b).”