AGN-driven quenching of star formation: morphological and dynamical implications for early-type galaxies

By Y. Dubois, R. Gavazzi, Sébastien Peirani, J. Silk. 2013

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In order to understand the physical mechanisms at work during the formation of massive early-type galaxies, we performed six zoomed hydrodynamical cosmological simulations of halos in the mass range 4.3 10^12 < M_vir < 8.0 10^13 M_sun at z=0, using the Adaptive Mesh Refinement code RAMSES. These simulations explore the role of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), through jets powered by the accretion onto supermassive black holes on the formation of massive elliptical galaxies. In the absence of AGN feedback, large amounts of stars accumulate in the central galaxies to form overly massive, blue, compact and rotation-dominated galaxies. Powerful AGN jets transform the central galaxies into red extended and dispersion-dominated galaxies. This morphological transformation of disc galaxies into elliptical galaxies is driven by the efficient quenching of the in situ star formation due to AGN feedback, which transform these galaxies into systems built up by accretion. For galaxies mainly formed by accretion, the proportion of stars deposited farther away from the centre increases, and galaxies have larger sizes. The accretion is also directly responsible for randomising the stellar orbits, increasing the amount of dispersion over rotation of stars as a function of time. Finally, we find that our galaxies simulated with AGN feedback better match the observed scaling laws, such as the size-mass, velocity dispersion-mass, fundamental plane relations, and slope of the total density profiles at z~0, from dynamical and strong lensing constraints.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be42ab6c42a2551e9a952fafbd47073b49a7a8d5

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Citations in the corpus

Galaxy Masses: A Review (2013, background): “The simplicity of the total mass density profiles of ETGs has been sometimes called the “bulge-halo” conspiracy (Dutton & Treu 2013), and it provides important constraints on theoretical models of ETGs formation, especially on parameters that drive the star formation efficiency like supernovae and n”
The stellar mass assembly of galaxies in the Illustris simulation: growth by mergers and the spatial distribution of accreted stars (2015, methodology): “…fraction (i.e. by applying a correction to their nominal ex situ fraction based on information provided in the same paper), while we note that the results by Oser et al. (2010) and Dubois et al. (2013) are given as a function of the stellar mass measured within 0.1Rvir and are not corrected here.”
The Horizon-AGN Simulation: Morphological Diversity of Galaxies ,Promoted by AGN Feedback (2016, methodology): “…particle hydrodynamics and grid-based codes leading to different galaxy morphologies in absence of AGN as highlighted by Scannapieco et al. (2012) (see Dubois et al. 2013, for a dis- 1 At fixed halo mass, the ex situ mass acquired by the central galaxy is larger in the absence of AGN feedback.”
Dancing in the dark: galactic properties trace spin swings along the cosmic web (2014, background): “The effect of AGN feedback is to also reduce the mass of stars formed in situ, i.e. to prevent the formation of a rotation-supported component in massive galaxies and to turn massive galaxies into pressure-supported ellipticals (Dubois et al. 2013).”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “AGN feedback transforms BCGs from fast rotators to slow rotators, possibly in better agreement with observations (Dubois et al. 2013b, Martizzi et al. 2014).”
The Auriga Project: the properties and formation mechanisms of disc galaxies across cosmic time (2016, background): “This is particularly true for the cases in which the effects of non-linear feedback cycles, especially those driven by AGN, affect a wide range of physical scales (e.g. Springel et al. 2005; Sijacki et al. 2007; Dubois et al. 2013; Weinberger et al. 2017).”
The size evolution of star-forming and quenched galaxies in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, background): “…such that the relation hardly evolves with time; Oser et al. (2012), who explicitly showed the contribution of dry mergers to size growth; and Dubois et al. (2013), who showed that massive galaxies are significantly larger in zoom-in simulations that include AGN feedback than in those that…”
Selection bias in dynamically measured supermassive black hole samples: its consequences and the quest for the most fundamental relation (2016, background): “; Dubois et al. 2013; Hirschmann et al. 2014; Sesana et al. 2014; Aversa et al. 2015; Fontanot et al. 2015; Sijacki et al. 2015), as well as on the average radiative efficiencies/black hole spin and/or fraction of obscured sources (e.g., Soltan 1982; Elvis et al. 2002; Shankar et al. 2013b; Aversa…”
Supermassive black holes and their feedback effects in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, background): “Recent simulations that model the formation of massive galaxies rely on feedback effects from SMBHs to reproduce the properties of massive galaxies (Springel et al. 2005; Bower et al. 2006; Croton et al. 2006; Dubois et al. 2013; Martizzi et al. 2014; Choi et al. 2015; Somerville & Davé 2015).”