A Superbubble Feedback Model for Galaxy Simulations

By B. Keller, James Wadsley, S. Benincasa, Hugh M. P. Couchman. 2014

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a new stellar feedback model that reproduces superbubbles. Superbubbles from clustered young stars evolve quite differently to individual supernovae and are substantially more efficient at generating gas motions. The essential new components of the model are thermal conduction, sub-grid evaporation and a sub-grid multi-phase treatment for cases where the simulation mass resolution is insufficient to model the early stages of the superbubble. The multi-phase stage is short compared to superbubble lifetimes. Thermal conduction physically regulates the hot gas mass without requiring a free parameter. Accurately following the hot component naturally avoids overcooling. Prior approaches tend to heat too much mass, leaving the hot ISM below $10^6$ K and susceptible to rapid cooling unless ad-hoc fixes were used. The hot phase also allows feedback energy to correctly accumulate from multiple, clustered sources, including stellar winds and supernovae. We employ high-resolution simulations of a single star cluster to show the model is insensitive to numerical resolution, unresolved ISM structure and suppression of conduction by magnetic fields. We also simulate a Milky Way analog and a dwarf galaxy. Both galaxies show regulated star formation and produce strong outflows.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de2717d93cc3248806bd9e48a102dac5e50eff9f

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Citations in the corpus

MOMENTUM INJECTION BY SUPERNOVAE IN THE INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM (2014, background): “To address some of these issues, Keller et al. (2014) have recently developed a (two-phase) subgrid model to follow feedback effects from superbubbles, in which the proportions of hot and cold subgrid phases are controlled by thermal conduction, and both phases cool radiatively.”
NIHAO project – I. Reproducing the inefficiency of galaxy formation across cosmic time with a large sample of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations (2015, background): “In their paper describing superbubble feedback, Keller et al. (2014) described the updates they made to gasoline.”
The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments (2014, background): “…al. 2005; Oppenheimer & Davé 2006), temporarily turning off radiative cooling (e.g. Gerritsen 1997; Stinson et al. 2006), and explicitly decoupling different thermal phases (also within single particles) (e.g. Marri & White 2003; Scannapieco et al. 2006; Murante et al. 2010; Keller et al. 2014).”
Gasoline2: a modern smoothed particle hydrodynamics code (2017, background): “We explicitly note that several of these features were introduced previously (e.g. Wadsley, Veeravalli & Couchman 2008; Shen, Wadsley & Stinson 2010; Keller et al. 2014).”
NIHAO – IV: core creation and destruction in dark matter density profiles across cosmic time (2015, methodology): “This new set of simulations has been performed using the new cosmological parameters from the Planck satellite (the Planck Collab ration 2014), and an updated version of theGASOLINE code (Keller et al. 2014) which fixes some of the known problems of the SPH technique (Agertz et al. 2007).”
Supernova feedback in an inhomogeneous interstellar medium (2014, background): “…hot superbubbles, potentially reducing the amount energy that is converted into turbulence at the midplane in favour of driving a galactic wind or a galactic fountain (Chevalier 1977; Weaver et al. 1977; Mac Low, McCray & Norman 1989; Mac Low & Ferrara 1999; Keller et al. 2014; Sharma et al. 2014).”
NIHAO - XI. Formation of ultra-diffuse galaxies by outflows (2016, methodology): “The simulated galaxies are taken from the Numerical Investigation of a Hundred Astrophysical Objects (NIHAO) project (Wang et al. 2015), evolved using the SPH code Gasoline (Wadsley et al. 2004; Keller et al. 2014).”
The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: calibration of subgrid physics and model variations (2015, background): “A density dependence of this sort can also be motivated on physical grounds (e.g. Heiles 1990; Creasey et al. 2013; Krause et al. 2013; Nath & Shchekinov 2013; Roy et al. 2013; Keller et al. 2014), but our main motivation is to combat the numerical problems described above.”