Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation

By T. Naab, Jeremiah P. Ostriker. 2016

415 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Numerical simulations have become a major tool for understanding galaxy formation and evolution. Over the decades the field has made significant progress. It is now possible to simulate the formation of individual galaxies and galaxy populations from well-defined initial conditions with realistic abundances and global properties. An essential component of the calculation is to correctly estimate the inflow to and outflow from forming galaxies because observations indicating low formation efficiency and strong circumgalactic presence of gas are persuasive. Energetic “feedback” from massive stars and accreting supermassive black holes—generally unresolved in cosmological simulations—plays a major role in driving galactic outflows, which have been shown to regulate many aspects of galaxy evolution. A surprisingly large variety of plausible subresolution models succeeds in this exercise. They capture the essential characteristics of the problem, i.e., outflows regulating galactic gas flows, but their predicti...

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2e62e5989245bfe1980bb5da41c5d136e99bdfd

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Citations in the corpus

UniverseMachine: The correlation between galaxy growth and dark matter halo assembly from z = 0−10 (2018, background): “For example, current implementations attempt to simulate the effects of supernovae, radiation pressure, multiphase gas, black hole accretion, photo- and collisional ionization, and chemistry (Somerville & Davé 2015; Naab & Ostriker 2017).”
CEERS Key Paper. I. An Early Look into the First 500 Myr of Galaxy Formation with JWST (2022, background): “…rate that may be enhanced by up to an order of magnitude per unit stellar mass, possibly resulting in stronger supernova-driven galactic winds (e.g., Dayal & Ferrara 2018; Jaacks et al. 2019), with alternative explanations for any such signature possible as well (e.g., Naab & Ostriker 2017).”
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).”
The ALPINE-ALMA [CII] survey (2020, background): “Two main processes are shown, thanks to increasingly detailed simulations, to drive this evolution: gas accretion and galaxy merging (Hopkins et al. 2006; Dekel et al. 2009; Bournaud et al. 2011; Naab & Ostriker 2017).”
Radio galaxies and feedback from AGN jets (2020, background): “tion of stars and growth in stellar mass are a key element of modern galaxy formation models (e.g., Somerville and Davé, 2015; Naab and Ostriker, 2017).”
simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, background): “While this framework has been broadly successful at reproducing many key observed characteristics of the galaxy population at a range of cosmic epochs, the physical understanding of most of these small-scale feedback processes remains coarse and heuristic (see Naab & Ostriker 2017, for a review).”