The Auriga Project: the properties and formation mechanisms of disc galaxies across cosmic time

By R. Grand, F. G'omez, F. Marinacci, Rüdiger Pakmor, Volker Springel, D. Campbell, Carlos S. Frenk, Adrian Jenkins, Simon D. M. White. 2016

359 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce a suite of 30 cosmological magneto-hydrodynamical zoom simulations of the formation of galaxies in isolated Milky Way mass dark haloes. These were carried out with the moving mesh code arepo, together with a comprehensive model for galaxy formation physics, including active galactic nuclei (AGN) feedback and magnetic fields, which produces realistic galaxy populations in large cosmological simulations. We demonstrate that our simulations reproduce a wide range of present-day observables, in particular, two-component disc-dominated galaxies with appropriate stellar masses, sizes, rotation curves, star formation rates and metallicities. We investigate the driving mechanisms that set present-day disc sizes/scalelengths, and find that they are related to the angular momentum of halo material. We show that the largest discs are produced by quiescent mergers that inspiral into the galaxy and deposit high-angular momentum material into the pre-existing disc, simultaneously increasing the spin of dark matter and gas in the halo. More violent mergers and strong AGN feedback play roles in limiting disc size by destroying pre-existing discs and by suppressing gas accretion on to the outer disc, respectively. The most important factor that leads to compact discs, however, is simply a low angular momentum for the halo. In these cases, AGN feedback plays an important role in limiting central star formation and the formation of a massive bulge.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8fb56e3c41f75804ad4433bce79f8a20a7263c2

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Citations in the corpus

Supermassive black holes and their feedback effects in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, background): “One mechanism that could alleviate this discrepancy would be a more efficient (or possibly additional e.g. Stinson et al. 2013; Hopkins et al. 2017) stellar feedback channel at high redshift, as proposed by Grand et al. (2017) for an entirely independent reason.”
Quenching and ram pressure stripping of simulated Milky Way satellite galaxies (2017, methodology): “These simulations are the Level 4 resolution simulations from Grand et al. (2017). distribution is likely incomplete at the fainter end.”
First results from the TNG50 simulation: galactic outflows driven by supernovae and black hole feedback (2019, background): “…al. 2014), with project campaigns of order 10 to 100 galaxies in total (Wang et al. 2015), often oriented around a focus such as Milky Way mass halos (Grand et al. 2017), Local Group analogs (Sawala et al. 2016) or the challenging regime of galaxies in high-density cluster environments (Bahé et…”
Cosmological simulations of the circumgalactic medium with 1 kpc resolution: enhanced H i column densities (2018, methodology): “…simulations have seen dramatic advances in recent years, producing well-resolved stellar discs with sizes, scale lengths, and stellar masses in reasonable agreement with observations of late-type galaxies (e.g. Schaye et al. 2015; Grand et al. 2017; Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2018; Genel et al. 2018b).”
Simulating galaxy formation with the IllustrisTNG model (2017, methodology): “A targeted study is needed to properly understand such mechanism in the TNG model and to make a quantitative comparison to the findings of Marinacci et al. (2015) and Pakmor et al. (2017) who have quantified the balance among magnetic, thermal and kinetic energy in the ISM and gaseous haloes of samp”
The milky way total mass profile as inferred from Gaia DR2 (2019, methodology): “Our final sample consist of 33 medium-resolution and 5 high-resolution Auriga haloes, 16 medium-resolution and 6 high-resolution APOSTLE haloes, and 27 EAGLE_recal haloes.”
The influence of Sagittarius and the Large Magellanic Cloud on the stellar disc of the Milky Way Galaxy (2017, background): “We also note that our experiment lacks a cosmological context under which the Galaxy as a whole is growing and interacting with its subhaloes (Aumer & White 2013; Grand et al. 2017; Ma et al. 2017).”
Evidence for two early accretion events that built the Milky Way stellar halo (2019, methodology): “This was derived in Fattahi et al. (2019) using cosmological hydrodynamical simulations (Grand et al. 2017), and is consistent with the estimates from Mackereth et al. (2019) and Vincenzo et al. (2019).”
The Local Group on FIRE: dwarf galaxy populations across a suite of hydrodynamic simulations (2018, background): “…mass function (SMF) and sizes of galaxies at z = 0.1 (Crain et al. 2015; Schaye et al. 2015), to 12 LG-like volumes,2 1The Auriga simulations (Grand et al. 2017), high-resolution magnetohydrodynamic zoom-ins focusing on isolated MW-mass galaxies, also reproduce the MW/M31 satellite…”
First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: the stellar mass content of groups and clusters of galaxies (2017, background): “…sized mass (e.g. Guedes et al. 2011; Stinson et al. 2013; Marinacci et al. 2014; Hopkins et al. 2014; Wang et al. 2015; Christensen et al. 2016; Grand et al. 2017; Agertz & Kravtsov 2016; Hopkins et al. 2017) or on large cosmological volumes about 1003 Mpc3 across (Vogelsberger et al. 2014b;…”
The lifecycle of molecular clouds in nearby star-forming disc galaxies (2019, background): “Recent simulations of galaxy formation and evolution are now able to resolve the scales of GMCs (e.g. Grand et al. 2017; Hopkins et al. 2018), but observations have long been unable to match this step outside a small number of very nearby galaxies, mostly confined to the Local Group (e.g. Bolatto…”
The IllustrisTNG simulations: public data release (2018, background): “In addition, ‘zoom’ simulation campaigns include NIHAO (Wang et al. 2015), FIRE-2 (Hopkins et al. 2018), and Auriga (Grand et al. 2017), in addition to many others.”
The biggest splash (2019, background): “These six haloes (nos 6, 16, 23, 24, and 27) are a subset of the original 30 haloes published in Grand et al. (2017).”