Making Galaxies in a Cosmological Context: The Need for Early Stellar Feedback

By G. Stinson, C. Brook, A. Macciò, James Wadsley, Thomas R. Quinn, Hugh M. P. Couchman, Mpia, UAMadrid, McMaster, U. Washington. 2012

345 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce the Making Galaxies in a Cosmological Context (MaGICC) program of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations. We describe a parameter study of galaxy formation simulations of an L* galaxy that uses early stellar feedback combined with supernova feedback to match the stellar mass--halo mass relationship. While supernova feedback alone can reduce star formation enough to match the stellar mass--halo mass relationship, the galaxy forms too many stars before z=2 to match the evolution seen using abundance matching. Our early stellar feedback is purely thermal and thus operates like a UV ionization source as well as providing some additional pressure from the radiation of massive, young stars. The early feedback heats gas to >10^6 K before cooling to 10^4 K. The pressure from this hot gas creates a more extended disk and prevents more star formation prior to z=1 than supernovae feedback alone. The resulting disk galaxy has a flat rotation curve, an exponential surface brightness profile, and matches a wide range of disk scaling relationships. The disk forms from the inside-out with an increasing exponential scale length as the galaxy evolves. Overall, early stellar feedback helps to simulate galaxies that match observational results at low and high redshifts.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bcfa2309e943ef960bd807830184700daef81d95

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. Volker Springel
3. L. Hernquist
4. T. Naab
5. R. Dav'e
6. C. Faucher-Giguére
7. E. Quataert
8. D. Keres̆

Citations in the corpus

• Measuring the vertical age structure of the Galactic disc using asteroseismology and SAGA (2015, background): “…more quiescent phases, characterized by the formation of younger disc stars in a more flattened, rotationally supported configuration (e.g. Genzel et al. 2006; Bournaud et al. 2009; Aumer et al. 2010; House et al. 2011; Forbes, Krumholz & Burkert 2012; Bird et al. 2013; Stinson et al. 2013).”
• The Auriga Project: the properties and formation mechanisms of disc galaxies across cosmic time (2016, methodology): “Prompt stellar feedback was introduced by Stinson et al. (2013b) and Aumer et al. (2013), and is reported to be critical in preventing the early onset of star formation and thereby avoiding the growth of a central spheroidal component into a massive bulge.”
• SIMULATIONS OF DISK GALAXIES WITH COSMIC RAY DRIVEN GALACTIC WINDS (2013, background): “…part of galaxy formation models, because the absence of outflows galaxy star formation rates (SFRs) are much higher than those observed (e.g., Stinson et al. 2013) and baryon fractions in the disk are close to the universal value (e.g., Crain et al. 2007), much higher than inferred from…”
• Gusty, gaseous flows of FIRE: Galactic winds in cosmological simulations with explicit stellar feedback (2015, methodology): “The second approach uses the socalled ‘blastwave’ model to account for the unresolved expansion phase of the SN remnant following the explosion (e.g. Thacker & Couchman 2000; Stinson et al. 2006, 2013; Governato et al. 2007; Guedes et al. 2011; Shen et al. 2014; Christensen et al. 2015).”
• A mass-dependent density profile for dark matter haloes including the influence of galaxy formation (2014, neutral): “…the fiducial parameters from Stinson et al. (2013) match the stellar-halo mass relation at z = 0 (Guo et al.2010; Moster et al.2010) and at higher redshift (Kannan et al. 2014) as well as a range of present observed galaxy properties and scaling relations (Brook et al. 2012b; Stinson et al. 2013).”
• MUFASA: Galaxy Formation Simulations With Meshless Hydrodynamics (2016, methodology): “In this way, the approach has similarities to the blast wave cooling shutoff model of e.g. Governato et al. (2007) and Stinson et al. (2013).”
• EMERGE – an empirical model for the formation of galaxies since z ∼ 10 (2017, background): “For example, Stinson et al. (2013) have compared the SFHs of simulated galaxies to the empirical average SFHs by Moster et al. (2013), and found that supernova feedback alone can reduce star formation enough to match the integrated conversion efficiency at z = 0, but the simulations still form too…”
• 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.”
• The formation of disc galaxies in high-resolution moving-mesh cosmological simulations (2013, methodology): “Recently, however, the situation has profoundly changed, and there are now several studies that obtained disc galaxies in quite reasonable agreement with key observables (Governato et al. 2010; Agertz et al. 2011; Guedes et al. 2011; Brooks et al. 2011; Stinson et al. 2013; Aumer et al. 2013).”
• The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments (2014, background): “…sizes and masses (e.g. Governato et al. 2004, 2010; Okamoto et al. 2005; Agertz et al. 2011; Guedes et al. 2011; McCarthy et al. 2012; Brook et al. 2012; Stinson et al. 2013; Munshi et al. 2013; Aumer et al. 2013; Hopkins et al. 2013; Vogelsberger et al. 2013, 2014b; Marinacci et al. 2014).”
• Reconstructing the star formation history of the Milky Way disc(s) from chemical abundances (2014, result): “This functional form is more similar to the SFRs recovered by some ΛCDM cosmological simulations (e.g. Brook et al. 2014; Stinson et al. 2013; Aumer & White 2013).”
• Vertical disc heating in Milky Way-sized galaxies in a cosmological context (2015, background): “…produce thin stellar discs with small bulges (Governato et al. 2010; Agertz et al. 2011; Guedes et al. 2011; Martig et al. 2012; Aumer et al. 2013; Stinson et al. 2013a; Marinacci et al. 2 We note that stars that migrate via satellite interactions are kinematically heated, and predominantly sink…”
• Physical Models of Galaxy Formation in a Cosmological Framework (2014, background): “While successful in many regards, this model still predicted too much early star formation, so Stinson et al. (2013) added “early stellar feedback” intended to mimic the energy input from young stellar winds and radiation.”
• Towards a more realistic population of bright spiral galaxies in cosmological simulations (2013, background): “We conclude that any kind of feedback process acting before the explosion of SNe with effects similar to those in our model is likely to achieve this effect (see also Stinson et al. 2013; Brook et al. 2012).”
• FIRE-2 simulations: physics versus numerics in galaxy formation (2017, background): “…“turning off cooling” for some adjusted duration, as in Stinson et al. (2006); Governato et al. (2010); Macciò et al. (2012); Teyssier et al. (2013); Stinson et al. (2013); Crain et al. (2015), or directly putting in winds “by hand” as in Springel & Hernquist (2003a); Davé et al. (2006);…”