The Horizon-AGN Simulation: Morphological Diversity of Galaxies ,Promoted by AGN Feedback

By Y. Dubois, Sébastien Peirani, C. Pichon, J. Devriendt, R. Gavazzi, C. Welker, M. Volonteri. 2016

284 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The interplay between cosmic gas accretion on to galaxies and galaxy mergers drives the observed morphological diversity of galaxies. By comparing the state-of-the-art hydrodynamical cosmological simulations Horizon-AGN and Horizon-noAGN, we unambiguously identify the critical role of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in setting up the correct galaxy morphology for the massive end of the population. With AGN feedback, typical kinematic and morpho-metric properties of galaxy populations as well as the galaxy-halo mass relation are in much better agreement with observations. Only AGN feedback allows massive galaxies at the centre of groups and clusters to become ellipticals, while without AGN feedback those galaxies reform discs. It is the merger-enhanced AGN activity that is able to freeze the morphological type of the post-merger remnant by durably quenching its quiescent star formation. Hence morphology is shown to be driven not only by mass but also by the nature of cosmic accretion: at constant galaxy mass, ellipticals are galaxies that are mainly assembled through mergers, while discs are preferentially built from the in situ star formation fed by smooth cosmic gas infall.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cae0b143945237622003eac099ac3f4c834325e6

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. L. Hernquist
2. Volker Springel
3. P. Hopkins
4. M. Vogelsberger
5. P. Torrey
6. Shy Genel
7. F. Marinacci
8. D. Nelson

In Instrumentation

1. Volker Springel
2. L. Hernquist
3. M. Vogelsberger
4. P. Hopkins
5. Shy Genel
6. P. Torrey
7. F. Marinacci
8. D. Nelson

Citations in the corpus

• Supermassive black holes and their feedback effects in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, background): “In high-resolution simulations of representative cosmological volumes (Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Schaye et al. 2015; Dubois et al. 2016; Khandai et al. 2015; Anglés-Alcázar et al. 2017b; Tremmel et al. 2017b) it is possible to track the evolution of SMBHs and their host galaxies through cosmic time…”
• First results from the TNG50 simulation: galactic outflows driven by supernovae and black hole feedback (2019, background): “…clarified the need for efficient outflows in order to make realistic galaxy populations whose characteristics and integral properties are roughly in agreement with observational constraints (Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Genel et al. 2014; Crain et al. 2015; Schaye et al. 2015; Dubois et al. 2016).”
• Simulating galaxy formation with black hole driven thermal and kinetic feedback (2016, background): “…Brighenti & Mathews 2006; Brüggen et al. 2007; Cattaneo & Teyssier 2007; Sternberg et al. 2007; Sternberg & Soker 2009; Gaspari et al. 2011a,b, 2012; Li & Bryan 2014a,b; Li et al. 2015; Hillel & Soker 2016; Yang & Reynolds 2016a,b), or in cosmological simulations (Dubois et al. 2010, 2012, 2016).”
• The dark nemesis of galaxy formation : why hot haloes trigger black hole growth and bring star formation to an end (2016, background): “Such observations have motivated the inclusion of black hole feedback in cosmological galaxy formation models (eg., Di Matteo et al. 2005; Croton et al. 2006; Bower et al. 2006; Sijacki et al. 2007; Booth & Schaye 2009; Dubois et al. 2013; Sijacki et al. 2015; Dubois et al. 2016).”
• Cool outflows in galaxies and their implications (2020, background): “…formation simulations that incorporate the observable properties of the best-studied outflow systems (Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Schaye et al. 2015; Dubois et al. 2016; Choi et al. 2018; Biernacki and Teyssier 2018; Brennan et al. 2018; Hopkins et al. 2018b; Davé et al. 2019; Nelson et al. 2019;…”
• First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: matter and galaxy clustering (2017, background): “…such as Illustris (Vogelsberger et al. 2014b; Genel et al. 2014), EAGLE (Schaye et al. 2015), MassiveBlack-II (Khandai et al. 2015), HorizonAGN (Dubois et al. 2016), and Mageneticum (Dolag, Komatsu & Sunyaev 2016) have succeeded in predicting galaxy populations in reasonable agreement with…”
• Active galactic nuclei: what’s in a name? (2017, background): “…2016; Wada et al. 2016), the physics of the inner accretion flow and the launching of winds and relativistic jets (e.g. Tchekhovskoy 2015; Waters and Proga 2016), and the impact of this feedback on host galaxies and halos (e.g. Dubois et al. 2016; McAlpine et al. 2017; Weinberger et al. 2017).”
• First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: the galaxy colour bimodality (2017, background): “In concert with other large-volume efforts (Dubois et al. 2016; Dolag et al. 2016; Davé et al. 2016) these projects have convincingly demonstrated that hydrodynamical simulations of structure formation at kilo-parsec spatial resolution can reasonably reproduce the fundamental properties and…”