Rigging dark haloes: why is hierarchical galaxy formation consistent with the inside‐out build‐up of thin discs?

By C. Pichon, D. Pogosyan, T. Kimm, A. Slyz, J. Devriendt, Y. Dubois. 2011

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

State-of-the-art hydrodynamical simulations show that gas inflow through the virial sphere of dark matter haloes is focused (i.e. has a preferred inflow direction), consistent (i.e. its orientation is steady in time) and amplified (i.e. the amplitude of its advected specific angular momentum increases with time). We explain this to be a consequence of the dynamics of the cosmic web within the neighbourhood of the halo, which produces steady, angular momentum rich, filamentary inflow of cold gas. On large scales, the dynamics within neighbouring patches drives matter out of the surrounding voids, into walls and filaments before it finally gets accreted on to virialized dark matter haloes. As these walls/filaments constitute the boundaries of asymmetric voids, they acquire a net transverse motion, which explains the angular momentum rich nature of the later infall which comes from further away. We conjecture that this large-scale driven consistency explains why cold flows are so efficient at building up high-redshift thin discs inside out.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cfa867b5e2d1987d35706d48aa149eee5d4ccda7

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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

In Instrumentation

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

Citations in the corpus

• Connecting the cosmic web to the spin of dark haloes: implications for galaxy formation (2012, methodology): “Recently, Pichon et al. (2011) showed how the cold gas drains out of the prominent voids in the cosmic web, into sheets and filaments before it finally gets accreted onto dark matter halos.”
• The size evolution of star-forming and quenched galaxies in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, background): “Disc galaxies are usually considered to be growing inside-out by continuous star-formation that is fed by accretion from outside the galaxy (Pichon et al. 2011; Bird et al. 2013), and indeed the effective sizes of the star-forming parts of disc galaxies are observed to be typically larger than the…”
• Toy models for galaxy formation versus simulations (2013, background): “…the dark-matter haloes (a) because of the way angular momentum is transported into the disc by cold streams from the cosmic web (Kimm et al. 2011; Pichon et al. 2011; Danovich et al. 2012; Stewart et al. 2013), and (b) because outflows tend to preferentially carry away…”
• Wet Disc Contraction to Galactic Blue Nuggets and Quenching to Red Nuggets (2013, background): “On the other hand, the baryons exchange angular momentum with the dark matter due to strong torques as they stream in (Pichon et al. 2011; Kimm et al. 2011; Tillson et al. 2012; Codis et al. 2012; Danovich et al. 2012; Stewart et al. 2013, M. Danovich et al. in preparation).”
• Four phases of angular-momentum buildup in high-z galaxies: from cosmic-web streams through an extended ring to disc and bulge (2014, background): “This can also be viewed as asymmetric transverse flows from voids and pancakes into the streams (Pichon et al. 2011).”
• The Intrinsic Alignment of Galaxies and its Impact on Weak Gravitational Lensing in an Era of Precision Cosmology (2014, methodology): “For a detailed review of weak gravitational lensing and its applications, we refer the reader to the previous review articles by Schneider et al. (1992); Mellier (1999); Bartelmann and Schneider (2001); Wittman (2002); Refregier (2003b); van Waerbeke and Mellier (2003); Schneider et al.”
• CONNECTING ANGULAR MOMENTUM AND GALACTIC DYNAMICS: THE COMPLEX INTERPLAY BETWEEN SPIN, MASS, AND MORPHOLOGY (2015, background): “The angular momentum properties of the inflowing gas were studied by Pichon et al. (2011).”
• Star formation sustained by gas accretion (2014, background): “Pichon et al. (2011) carry out simulations where the disk angular momentum comes from filaments and increases over time, building up disks from the inside out.”
• The Horizon-AGN Simulation: Morphological Diversity of Galaxies ,Promoted by AGN Feedback (2016, background): “Therefore, the size-mass increase with time at the low-mass end can be explained by the fact that the cosmological gas accretion at low-redshift has a higher angular momentum than at high redshift (Pichon et al. 2011; Kimm et al. 2011).”