The impact of star formation feedback on the circumgalactic medium

By Drummond Buschman Fielding, E. Quataert, Michael McCourt, T. Thompson. 2016

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use idealized 3D hydrodynamic simulations to study the dynamics and thermal structure of the circumgalactic medium (CGM). Our simulations quantify the role of cooling, stellar feedback driven galactic winds and cosmological gas accretion in setting the properties of the CGM in dark matter haloes ranging from $10^{11}$ to $10^{12}$ M$_\odot$. Our simulations support a conceptual picture in which the properties of the CGM, and the key physics governing it, change markedly near a critical halo mass of M$_{\rm crit} \approx 10^{11.5}$ M$_\odot$. As in calculations without stellar feedback, above M$_{\rm crit}$ halo gas is supported by thermal pressure created in the virial shock. The thermal properties at small radii are regulated by feedback triggered when $t_{\rm cool}/t_{\rm ff}\lesssim10$ in the hot gas. Below M$_{\rm crit}$, however, there is no thermally supported halo and self-regulation at $t_{\rm cool}/t_{\rm ff}\sim10$ does not apply. Instead, the gas is out of hydrostatic equilibrium and largely supported against gravity by bulk flows (turbulence and coherent inflow/outflow) arising from the interaction between cosmological gas inflow and outflowing galactic winds. In these lower mass haloes, the phase structure depends sensitively on the outflows' energy per unit mass and mass-loading, which may allow measurements of the CGM thermal state to constrain the nature of galactic winds. Our simulations account for some of the properties of the multiphase halo gas inferred from quasar absorption line observations, including the presence of significant mass at a wide range of temperatures, and the characteristic OVI and CIV column densities and kinematics. However, we underpredict the neutral hydrogen content of the $z\sim0$ CGM.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa1e660e0de259aa0806cb9ee707d51e4ea4ab1d

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Citations in the corpus

A characteristic scale for cold gas (2016, methodology): “This independence of the initial temperature is consistent with the fragmentation cascade discussed in Voit & Donahue (1990) and in section 2.1, but not with models based on linear theory such as those discussed in Field, Goldsmith & Habing (1969), Hennebelle & Pérault (1999), Burkert & Lin (2000).”
Probing Galactic Halos with Fast Radio Bursts (2019, methodology): “Lastly, we present the DM profile based on the numerical simulations of Fielding et al. (2017) by scaling their 1012M halo (with η = 2) to Mhalo = 1.5× 1012M .”