ON THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN STAR FORMATION AND FEEDBACK IN GALAXY FORMATION SIMULATIONS

By O. Agertz, Andrey V. Kravtsov. 2014

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the star formation–feedback cycle in cosmological galaxy formation simulations, focusing on the progenitors of Milky Way (MW)-sized galaxies. We find that in order to reproduce key properties of the MW progenitors, such as semi-empirically derived star formation histories (SFHs) and the shape of rotation curves, our implementation of star formation and stellar feedback requires (1) a combination of local early momentum feedback via radiation pressure and stellar winds, and subsequent efficient supernovae feedback, and (2) an efficacy of feedback that results in the self-regulation of the global star formation rate on kiloparsec scales. We show that such feedback-driven self-regulation is achieved globally for a local star formation efficiency per free fall time of ϵ ff ≈ 10 % ?> . Although this value is larger that the ϵ ff ∼ 1 % ?> value usually inferred from the Kennicutt–Schmidt (KS) relation, we show that it is consistent with direct observational estimates of ϵ ff ?> in molecular clouds. Moreover, we show that simulations with local efficiency of ϵ ff ≈ 10 % ?> reproduce the global observed KS relation. Such simulations also reproduce the cosmic SFH of the MW-sized galaxies and satisfy a number of other observational constraints. Conversely, we find that simulations that a priori assume an inefficient mode of star formation, instead of achieving it via stellar feedback regulation, fail to produce sufficiently vigorous outflows and do not reproduce observations. This illustrates the importance of understanding the complex interplay between star formation and feedback, and the detailed processes that contribute to the feedback-regulated formation of galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e3da3af505a05fd0aa4ef2ed953c384896d3f439

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Citations in the corpus

The cosmic baryon cycle and galaxy mass assembly in the FIRE simulations (2016, methodology): “…galaxy formation models (Somerville & Davé 2015), required to regulate star formation in galaxies (Anglés-Alcázar et al. 2014; Hopkins et al. 2014; Agertz & Kravtsov 2015b; Muratov et al. 2015), produce disk galaxies with more realistic central baryonic distributions (Governato et al. 2007;…”
The Horizon-AGN simulation: evolution of galaxy properties over cosmic time (2016, background): “…is locally enhanced to the level that we observe in star clusters (∼ 10 % per free fall time), as clustered star formation drives stronger winds (Agertz & Kravtsov 2015) - enhanced efficiencies are indeed plausible, given the large fraction of field stars that are thought to come from the…”
Neutral hydrogen in galaxy haloes at the peak of the cosmic star formation history (2014, result): “Agertz & Kravtsov (2014) recently obtained broadly consistent results after implementing an approximate treatment of the same physics using a numerically distinct method.”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “Bottom right: AMR (RAMSES) simulation of Agertz & Kravtsov (2015).”
Understanding the shape and diversity of dwarf galaxy rotation curves in ΛCDM (2016, methodology): “The simulations were evolved for 14 Gyrs each, using the Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) code RAMSES (Teyssier 2002) with cooling, star formation and feedback physics prescriptions as described in detail in Agertz et al. (2013); Agertz & Kravtsov (2015) and R16.”
Dark matter cores all the way down (2015, methodology): “…feedback prescription, and choice of IMF, ytrue = 0.022. c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 Following Tassis et al. (2008), (see also Brooks et al. 2007; Agertz & Kravtsov 2015a), we calculate the observed effective yield using Equation 10, where we consider only the cold gas (T 6 104 K) and the…”
Black hole evolution – I. Supernova-regulated black hole growth (2015, background): “…more stellar feedback and having a larger star formation efficiency should reduce the stellar mass content of the galaxy and delay the formation of the bulge (Governato et al. 2010; Roškar et al. 2014; Agertz & Kravtsov 2015), and, as a consequence, further inhibits the growth of the central BH.”
How Stellar Feedback Simultaneously Regulates Star Formation and Drives Outflows (2015, background): “…mass is converted into stars per orbital time and the KennicuttSchmidt relation (Schmidt 1959; Kennicutt 1998) can be reproduced (e.g.Stinson et al. 2006; Shetty & Ostriker 2008, 2012; Kim et al. 2011; Ostriker & Shetty 2011; Hopkins et al. 2012b, 2014; Kim et al. 2013; Agertz & Kravtsov 2015a).”
Gusty, gaseous flows of FIRE: Galactic winds in cosmological simulations with explicit stellar feedback (2015, background): “These simulations were able to reproduce the correct relationship between stellar mass and halo mass at a variety of epochs (see also Agertz & Kravtsov 2015a,b; Trujillo-Gomez et al. 2015) and provide a way to explain the underabundance of baryons in galaxies, relative to the cosmic mean predicted…”