THREE-DIMENSIONAL HYDRODYNAMIC SIMULATIONS OF MULTIPHASE GALACTIC DISKS WITH STAR FORMATION FEEDBACK. I. REGULATION OF STAR FORMATION RATES

By Chang-Goo Kim, E. Ostriker, Woong-Tae Kim. 2013

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The energy and momentum feedback from young stars has a profound impact on the interstellar medium (ISM), including heating and driving turbulence in the neutral gas that fuels future star formation. Recent theory has argued that this leads to a quasi-equilibrium self-regulated state, and for outer atomic-dominated disks results in the surface density of star formation ΣSFR varying approximately linearly with the weight of the ISM (or midplane turbulent + thermal pressure). We use three-dimensional numerical hydrodynamic simulations to test the theoretical predictions for thermal, turbulent, and vertical dynamical equilibrium, and the implied functional dependence of ΣSFR on local disk properties. Our models demonstrate that all equilibria are established rapidly, and that the expected proportionalities between mean thermal and turbulent pressures and ΣSFR apply. For outer disk regions, this results in , where Σ is the total gas surface density and ρsd is the midplane density of the stellar disk (plus dark matter). This scaling law arises because ρsd sets the vertical dynamical time in our models (and outer disk regions generally). The coefficient in the star formation law varies inversely with the specific energy and momentum yield from massive stars. We find proportions of warm and cold atomic gas, turbulent-to-thermal pressure, and mean velocity dispersions that are consistent with solar-neighborhood and other outer disk observations. This study confirms the conclusions of a previous set of simulations, which incorporated the same physics treatment but was restricted to radial-vertical slices through the ISM.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aebcbc32fa072e0747041d0a71676db7df65b2a7

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Citations in the corpus

How Stellar Feedback Simultaneously Regulates Star Formation and Drives Outflows (2015, background): “…mass is converted into stars per orbital time and the KennicuttSchmidt relation (Schmidt 1959; Kennicutt 1998) can be reproduced (e.g.Stinson et al. 2006; Shetty & Ostriker 2008, 2012; Kim et al. 2011; Ostriker & Shetty 2011; Hopkins et al. 2012b, 2014; Kim et al. 2013; Agertz & Kravtsov 2015a).”
ESCAPE FRACTION OF IONIZING PHOTONS DURING REIONIZATION: EFFECTS DUE TO SUPERNOVA FEEDBACK AND RUNAWAY OB STARS (2014, background): “It is worth noting that the momentum transfer from SN explosions at the snowplow phase is essential to understanding the self-regulation of star formation in the local ISM (e.g. Shetty & Ostriker 2012; Kim et al. 2013).”
The SILCC project - III. Regulation of star formation and outflows by stellar winds and supernovae (2016, background): “The energy from SN explosions is injected right after the formation of each massive star (see also e.g. Kim et al. 2013; Kim & Ostriker 2015b), thus neglecting the time delay of the explosions corresponding to the stellar lifetime of single stars (typically 5–40 Myr).”
Raining on black holes and massive galaxies: the top-down multiphase condensation model (2016, methodology): “To model neutral and molecular gas cooling, we follow a prescription similar to reference ISM studies (e.g. Inoue & Inutsuka 2008; Kim, Kim & Ostriker 2008; Kim et al. 2013; Kim & Ostriker 2015).”
MOMENTUM INJECTION BY SUPERNOVAE IN THE INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM (2014, methodology): “…star formation rate, and the pressure and star formation rate are approximately proportional to each other for self-consistent solutions (Ostriker et al. 2010; Kim et al. 2011, 2013), we adopt a heating rate that varies with mean density as G G = -n( 2 cm )H0 3 , where G = ´ - -2 10 erg s0 26 1.”
Modeling UV Radiation Feedback from Massive Stars. II. Dispersal of Star-forming Giant Molecular Clouds by Photoionization and Radiation Pressure (2018, background): “…in the large-scale ISM compared to other forms of massive-star momentum injection, and is therefore not expected to be important in regulating either large-scale ISM pressure and star formation rates (e.g. Ostriker & Shetty 2011; Kim et al. 2013) or galaxy formation (e.g. Naab & Ostriker 2017).”
FIRE-2 simulations: physics versus numerics in galaxy formation (2017, methodology): “For the sake of completeness, we demonstrate this here, but refer readers to Hopkins et al. (2011, 2013d,e) and Kim et al. (2013) for more extensive discussions (see also § 4.1.3).”
Three-phase Interstellar Medium in Galaxies Resolving Evolution with Star Formation and Supernova Feedback (TIGRESS): Algorithms, Fiducial Model, and Convergence (2016, methodology): “In our previous work (e.g., Kim et al. 2013; Kim & Ostriker 2015b, which had smaller vertical domain than is required to follow the hot ISM and wind launching), we used r = -M0.”