TOWARD A COMPLETE ACCOUNTING OF ENERGY AND MOMENTUM FROM STELLAR FEEDBACK IN GALAXY FORMATION SIMULATIONS

By O. Agertz, Andrey V. Kravtsov, Samuel N. Leitner, Nickolay Y. Gnedin. 2012

283 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the momentum and energy budget of stellar feedback during different stages of stellar evolution, and study its impact on the interstellar medium (ISM) using simulations of local star-forming regions and galactic disks at the resolution affordable in modern cosmological zoom-in simulations. In particular, we present a novel subgrid model for the momentum injection due to radiation pressure and stellar winds from massive stars during early, pre-supernova (pre-SN) evolutionary stages of young star clusters. Early injection of momentum acts to clear out dense gas in star-forming regions, hence limiting star formation. The reduced gas density mitigates radiative losses of thermal feedback energy from subsequent SN explosions. The detailed impact of stellar feedback depends sensitively on the implementation and choice of parameters. Somewhat encouragingly, we find that implementations in which feedback is efficient lead to approximate self-regulation of the global star formation efficiency. We compare simulation results using our feedback implementation to other phenomenological feedback methods, where thermal feedback energy is allowed to dissipate over timescales longer than the formal gas cooling time. We find that simulations with maximal momentum injection suppress star formation to a similar degree as is found in simulations adopting adiabatic thermal feedback. However, different feedback schemes are found to produce significant differences in the density and thermodynamic structure of the ISM, and are hence expected to have a qualitatively different impact on galaxy evolution.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cce1de6424536d0a590901bdbeb8d04b8d68bdf4

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Citations in the corpus

A Superbubble Feedback Model for Galaxy Simulations (2014, methodology): “Agertz et al. (2013) used a decaying noncooling energy, where energy in a non-cooling state decayed back to the ‘normal’ cooling form.”
Supernova feedback in an inhomogeneous interstellar medium (2014, methodology): “Galaxy-scale (e.g. Hopkins et al. 2012a; Agertz et al. 2013) and cosmological simulations (e.g. Agertz & Kravtsov 2014; Hopkins et al. 2014) that implement approximations for multiple stellar feedback mechanisms show that they can interact non-linearly and in a non-trivial fashion.”
Before the first supernova: combined effects of H II regions and winds on molecular clouds (2014, unknown): “At galactic scales, the photons, momentum and energy produced by these processes and by supernovae shape the structures of galaxies and the interstellar medium and play a major role in globally regulating star formation (e.g Hopkins et al. 2013; Agertz et al. 2013).”
The SILCC (SImulating the LifeCycle of molecular Clouds) project – I. Chemical evolution of the supernova-driven ISM (2014, background): “…study of stellar feedback and the regulation of star formation on galactic scales (see e.g. Stinson et al. 2010; Hopkins, Quataert & Murray 2011, Agertz et al. 2013, and Genel et al. 2014 for a few recent examples), but much of this work considers only large scales and fails to resolve the…”
MOMENTUM INJECTION BY SUPERNOVAE IN THE INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM (2014, methodology): “For example, Agertz et al. (2013) applied only the initial ejecta momentum pfree rather than the momentum at the end of ST phase psf or the final momentum in the momentum conserving phase pfinal, citing concerns regarding inhomogeneity of the site of SN explosion.”
Three-phase Interstellar Medium in Galaxies Resolving Evolution with Star Formation and Supernova Feedback (TIGRESS): Algorithms, Fiducial Model, and Convergence (2016, methodology): “To deal with the “overcooling” problem in galaxy formation simulations, a wide variety of sub-grid models for treating feedback has been developed (e.g., Dalla Vecchia & Schaye 2012; Agertz et al. 2013; Teyssier et al. 2013; Hopkins et al. 2014; Kimm & Cen 2014).”
The SILCC project - III. Regulation of star formation and outflows by stellar winds and supernovae (2016, background): “In this context, the fundamental role of massive stars for the evolution of star-forming galaxies with a large range of masses has been emphasized in many recent numerical studies (see e.g. Agertz et al. 2013; Hopkins et al. 2014; Somerville & Davé 2015).”
How Stellar Feedback Simultaneously Regulates Star Formation and Drives Outflows (2015, background): “Recently, multiple groups have made significant advances by generating outflows self-consistently via stellar feedback without resorting to delayed cooling or kinematic decoupling (Hopkins et al. 2012a, 2013, 2014; Agertz et al. 2013; Agertz & Kravtsov 2015a,b).”
The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: calibration of subgrid physics and model variations (2015, background): “…dynamic range between star-forming complexes and galaxies (e.g. Joung & Mac Low 2006; Powell, Slyz & Devriendt 2011; Hopkins, Quataert & Murray 2012; Agertz et al. 2013; Creasey, Theuns & Bower 2013; Hopkins et al. 2014; Creasey, Theuns & Bower 2015), there are many profitable lines of enquiry to…”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, methodology): “It has been realized lately that, in galaxy scale simulations, accounting for the stellar luminosity (and winds) might significantly enhance the coupling of the stellar energy and momentum output to the ISM (e.g. Agertz et al. 2013; Hopkins, Quataert & Murray 2011, 2012a; Roškar et al. 2014).”
FIRE-2 simulations: physics versus numerics in galaxy formation (2017, background): “…generation of high-resolution galaxy-scale simulations has since emerged, which reach resolution sufficient to begin directly incorporating these physics, and to begin to resolve the multi-phase structure of the ISM (Tasker 2011; Hopkins et al. 2011, 2012c; Kannan et al. 2014; Agertz et al. 2013).”
The local dark matter density (2014, background): “Such feedback is not yet problematic given our uncertainties in how feedback operates (e.g. Agertz et al., 2013), but more work needs to be done on modelling the small scale physics and its coupling to larger scales to determine whether or not feedback can really regulate the growth of galaxies, or…”
The confinement of star-forming galaxies into a main sequence through episodes of gas compaction, depletion and replenishment (2015, background): “This ionizing radiation injects momentum around massive stars, pressurizing star-forming regions, as described in Appendix B of Agertz et al. (2013).”
Compaction and quenching of high-z galaxies in cosmological simulations: blue and red nuggets (2014, background): “This ionizing radiation injects momentum in the cells neighboring massive star particles younger than 5 Myr, and whose column density exceeds1021 cm−2, isotropically pressurizing the star-forming regions (as described also in Agertz et al. 2013, Appendix B).”
Galaxies on FIRE (Feedback In Realistic Environments): stellar feedback explains cosmologically inefficient star formation (2013, background): “It will be particularly interesting to see whether other recently-developed sub-grid models such as that in Agertz et al. (2013), also incorporating the effects of radiative feedback but via very different prescriptions, will also agree well with observations at both low and high redshifts.”
Black hole evolution – I. Supernova-regulated black hole growth (2015, methodology): “Future improvements should model SNe with more physically motivated assumptions using the correct amount of momentum imparted by the explosions (Agertz et al. 2013; Kimm et al. 2015) and study the interplay between circumnuclear star formation and black hole growth.”
Gravitational torque-driven black hole growth and feedback in cosmological simulations (2016, methodology): “Our simulations utilize the sub-grid model of Springel & Hernquist (2003) instead of resolving a multi-phase interstellar medium (ISM) and do not include stellar feedback-driven winds (e.g. Davé et al. 2011a,b; Agertz et al. 2013; Anglés-Alcázar et al. 2014; Hopkins et al. 2014).”