Cold streams in early massive hot haloes as the main mode of galaxy formation

By A. Dekel, Y. Birnboim, G. Engel, J. Freundlich, T. Goerdt, M. Mumcuoglu, E. Neistein, C. Pichon, Romain Teyssier, E. Zinger. Nature, 2008

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Massive galaxies in the young Universe, ten billion years ago, formed stars at surprising intensities. Although this is commonly attributed to violent mergers, the properties of many of these galaxies are incompatible with such events, showing gas-rich, clumpy, extended rotating disks not dominated by spheroids. Cosmological simulations and clustering theory are used to explore how these galaxies acquired their gas. Here we report that they are ‘stream-fed galaxies’, formed from steady, narrow, cold gas streams that penetrate the shock-heated media of massive dark matter haloes. A comparison with the observed abundance of star-forming galaxies implies that most of the input gas must rapidly convert to stars. One-third of the stream mass is in gas clumps leading to mergers of mass ratio greater than 1:10, and the rest is in smoother flows. With a merger duty cycle of 0.1, three-quarters of the galaxies forming stars at a given rate are fed by smooth streams. The rarer, submillimetre galaxies that form stars even more intensely are largely merger-induced starbursts. Unlike destructive mergers, the streams are likely to keep the rotating disk configuration intact, although turbulent and broken into giant star-forming clumps that merge into a central spheroid. This stream-driven scenario for the formation of discs and spheroids is an alternative to the merger picture.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

Idealized models for galactic disc formation and evolution in ‘realistic’ ΛCDM haloes (2012, background): “Such a setup clearly ignores evidence from cosmological hydrodynamical simulations that steady, narrow, cold gas streams penetrating the shock-heated atmosphere of massive dark matter haloes are important in feeding gas on to forming galaxies (e.g. Dekel et al. 2009).”
The ATLAS3D project – III. A census of the stellar angular momentum within the effective radius of early‐type galaxies: unveiling the distribution of fast and slow rotators (2011, background): “Accretion of gas from external sources, either via the large-scale filaments (e.g. Sancisi et al. 2008; Dekel et al. 2009; Khochfar & Silk 2009) or extracted by tidal forces from a gas-rich galaxy passing by, thus contributing to an increase in λR if the gas is corotating with the main existing…”
The Neutral Hydrogen Cosmological Mass Density at z = 5 (2015, background): “3, the H I phase must be continually replenished by more highly ionized gas, presumably through a combination of cold-mode accretion (e.g. Dekel et al. 2009) and recycled winds (e.g. Oppenheimer et al. 2010).”
ON SIZES, KINEMATICS, M/L GRADIENTS, AND LIGHT PROFILES OF MASSIVE COMPACT GALAXIES AT z ∼ 2 (2010, background): “Secular formation processes to grow such a bulge by coalescence of clumps in gas-rich disks (i.e., without invoking additional merging) have recently been proposed by Genzel et al. (2008), Elmegreen, Bournaud & Elmegreen (2008, and Dekel et al. (2009b).”
ANGULAR MOMENTUM AND GALAXY FORMATION REVISITED (2012, background): “…there are recent proposals that the special conditions in highredshift galaxy disks can lead to the massive, classical bulges of present-day spirals, lenticulars, and ellipticals (e.g., Noguchi 1999; Immeli et al. 2004; Elmegreen et al. 2008; Dekel et al. 2009a,b; Ceverino et al. 2010).”
Chemical tagging with APOGEE: Discovery of a large population of N-rich stars in the inner Galaxy (2016, background): “Shapiro et al. (2010) suggest that metal-poor GCs may have formed along cold filaments that were proposed by Dekel et al. (2009) and others to account for high star formation rates in the early universe.”
simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, background): “The AGN energy can then be deposited into the hot gas, providing a mechanism for quenching the galaxy by shutting off the fuel supply (Dekel et al. 2009).”
Galaxies in a simulated ΛCDM Universe – I. Cold mode and hot cores (2008, background): “Some of these clouds are bound and identified with 3 The typical accretion rates in Figure 7 are lower than those reported by Dekel et al. (2009) by a factor of several.”
The Herschel view of the dominant mode of galaxy growth from z = 4 to the present day (2014, background): “Large volume numerical simulations (Dekel et al. 2009a) have shown that streams of cold gas from the intergalactic medium can fulfill this role, allowing galaxies to keep forming stars at these high but steady rates.”
Compaction and quenching of high-z galaxies in cosmological simulations: blue and red nuggets (2014, background): “In the early disc phase, streams from the cosmic web, consisting of smooth gas and merging galaxies, continuously feed galactic discs (Birnboim & Dekel 2003; Kereš et al. 2005; Dekel & Birnboim 2006; Ocvirk, Pichon & Teyssier 2008; Kereš et al. 2009; Dekel et al. 2009; Danovich et al. 2012, 2014).”
The SLUGGS Survey: kinematics for over 2500 globular clusters in 12 early-type galaxies (2012, background): “Observations have shown that the origin of these clumps is related to disc instability processes (Wisnioski et al. 2011), but they may be also caused by cold flows (Dekel et al. 2009).”
Testing modified gravity at cosmological distances with LISA standard sirens (2019, background): “The baryonic structures that are evolved include a chemically pristine diffuse inter-galactic medium, which is either shock heated to the virial temperature of Dark Matter halos, or flows into the halos along cold filaments [179]; a cold, chemically enriched inter-stellar medium (in both a disk and ”
COLD FLOWS AND THE FIRST QUASARS (2011, background): “We find however that onceMhalo ∼ 1012 M⊙ and halos enter the regime where they are shock-heated (Dekel et al. 2009) the BH growth becomes finally self-regulated (see accretion rate evolution in Fig.”
The baryonic assembly of dark matter haloes (2011, background): “…these scalings lead to the common assumption that the star formation rates within haloes is approximated by a universal baryonic factor of the rate at which they acquire DM: SFR ≈ ( b/ DM)ṀDM (e.g. Genel et al. 2008; Dekel et al. 2009b; Bouché et al. 2010), with an optional efficiency factor.”
EVIDENCE FOR A CLUMPY, ROTATING GAS DISK IN A SUBMILLIMETER GALAXY AT z = 4 (2012, background): “The clumps then potentially migrate inward and merge into a spheroid (Dekel et al. 2009a,b).”
ESCAPE FRACTION OF IONIZING PHOTONS DURING REIONIZATION: EFFECTS DUE TO SUPERNOVA FEEDBACK AND RUNAWAY OB STARS (2014, background): “In order to esti- 2 Given that gas accretion is mostly filamentary (e.g.Ocvirk et al. 2008; Dekel et al. 2009; Kimm et al. 2011b; Stewart et al. 2011), the actual density of the gas that occupies most of the volume in the halo is likely to be even lower than the mean density of the universe, and…”
SUBMILLIMETER GALAXIES AS PROGENITORS OF COMPACT QUIESCENT GALAXIES (2014, background): “Simulations indicate that highly dissipational interactions on short timescales provide plausible mechanisms for creating compact stellar populations, either through major mergers (e.g. Naab et al. 2007, 2009), or dynamical instabilities fed by cold gas accretion (Dekel et al. 2009).”
THE RELATION BETWEEN STAR FORMATION RATE AND STELLAR MASS FOR GALAXIES AT 3.5 ⩽ z ⩽ 6.5 IN CANDELS (2014, background): “…are subdominant to galaxy growth at high redshift z > 2 (Murali et al. 2002; Kereš et al. 2005) and the SFR tracks the gas accretion rate (Birnboim & Dekel 2003; Katz et al. 2003; Kereš et al. 2005; Dekel et al. 2009; Bouché et al. 2010; Ceverino et al. 2010; FaucherGiguère et al. 2011).”
The evolution of the dust temperatures of galaxies in the SFR–M∗ plane up to z ~ 2 (2013, methodology): “…MS galaxies evolve with a secular mode of star formation, likely sustained by a continuous gas accretion from the IGM and along the cosmic web (Dekel et al. 2009; Davé et al. 2010), while star-forming galaxies located far above the MS evolve through strong starbursts with short duty-cycles,…”