Evolution of the atomic and molecular gas content of galaxies
By G. Popping, R. Somerville, Scott C. Trager. 2013
160 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study the evolution of atomic and molecular gas in galaxies in semi-analytic models of galaxy formation that include new modelling of the partitioning of cold gas in galactic discs into atomic, molecular, and ionized phases. We adopt two scenarios for the formation of molecules: one pressure based and one metallicity based. We find that both recipes successfully reproduce the gas fractions and gas-to-stellar mass ratios of H I and H2 in local galaxies, as well as the H I and H2 disc sizes up to z ≤ 2. We reach good agreement with the locally observed H I and H2 mass function, although both recipes slightly overpredict the low-mass end of the H I mass function. Both of our models predict that the high-mass end of the H I mass function remains nearly constant at redshifts z <2.0. The metallicity-based recipe yields a higher cosmic density of cold gas and much lower cosmic H2 fraction over the entire redshift range probed than the pressure-based recipe. These strong differences in H I mass function and cosmic density between the two recipes are driven by low-mass galaxies (log (M*/M⊙) ≤ 7) residing in low-mass haloes (log (Mvir/M⊙) ≤ 10). Both recipes predict that galaxy gas fractions remain high from z ˜ 6to3 and drop rapidly at lower redshift. The galaxy H2 fractions show a similar trend, but drop even more rapidly. We provide predictions for the CO J = 1-0 luminosity of galaxies, which will be directly comparable with observations with sub-mm and radio instruments.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f12772a501fa2fe19fc19a7a3589906356c270b
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Introducing the Illustris Project: the evolution of galaxy populations across cosmic time (2014, background): “This weak redshift evolution at z 2 is at odds with the prediction of the semi-analytical model by Popping et al. (2014), where the clear redshift evolution continues well above z ∼ 2.”
- Star formation in semi-analytic galaxy formation models with multiphase gas (2015, methodology): “In Popping et al. (2014a), the empirical predictions are shown only up to z ∼ 3, because it is not known whether these assumptions and empirical relations hold at higher redshift.”
- The dust content of galaxies from z = 0 to z = 9 (2016, background): “…gas mass function, SFRs, and stellar metallicities, as well as the evolution of the galaxy sizes, quenched fractions, stellar mass functions, and luminosity functions (Somerville et al. 2008b, 2012; Porter et al. 2014; Popping et al. 2014; Brennan et al. 2015; Popping et al. 2016, PST14, SPT15).”
- Physical Models of Galaxy Formation in a Cosmological Framework (2014, background): “Nonetheless, SAMs and simulations can broadly reproduce H i mass functions and scaling relations (Davé et al. 2013, Duffy et al. 2012, Lagos et al. 2011a, Obreschkow et al. 2009, Popping et al. 2009, 2014b).”
- A unified multiwavelength model of galaxy formation (2015, methodology): “The effects of using an SFR law based on molecular gas have been investigated inGALFORM by Lagos et al. (2011a, 2012, 2014a) and Gonzalez-Perez et al. (2014), and in other SA models by Fu et al. (2010, 2012), Berry et al. (2014) and Popping et al. (2014).”