Bimodal gas accretion in the Horizon–MareNostrum galaxy formation simulation

By P. Ocvirk, C. Pichon, Romain Teyssier. 2008

324 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The physics of diffuse gas accretion and the properties of the cold and hot modes of accretion on to proto-galaxies between z= 2 and 5.4 is investigated using the large cosmological simulation performed with the ramses code on the MareNostrum supercomputing facility. Galactic winds, chemical enrichment, ultraviolet background heating and radiative cooling are taken into account in this very high resolution simulation. Using accretion-weighted temperature histograms, we have performed two different measurements of the thermal state of the gas accreted towards the central galaxy. The first measurement, performed using accretion-weighted histograms on a spherical surface of radius 0.2Rvir centred on the densest gas structure near the halo centre of mass, is a good indicator of the presence of an accretion shock in the vicinity of the galactic disc. We define the hot shock mass, Mshock, as the typical halo mass separating cold dominated from hot dominated accretion in the vicinity of the galaxy. The second measurement is performed by radially averaging histograms between 0.2Rvir and Rvir, in order to detect radially extended structures such as gas filaments: this is a good proxy for detecting cold streams feeding the central galaxy. We define Mstream as the transition mass separating cold dominated from hot dominated accretion in the outer halo, marking the disappearance of these cold streams. We find a hot shock transition mass of Mshock= 1011.6 M⊙ (dark matter), with no significant evolution with redshift. Conversely, we find that Mstream increases sharply with z. Our measurements are in agreement with the analytical predictions of Birnboim & Dekel and Dekel & Birnboim, if we correct their model by assuming low metallicity(≤10−3 Z⊙)for the filaments, correspondingly to our measurements. Metal enrichment of the intergalactic medium is therefore a key ingredient in determining the transition mass from cold to hot dominated diffuse gas accretion. We find that the diffuse cold gas supply at the inner halo stops at z= 2 for objects with stellar masses of about 1011.1 M⊙, which is close to the quenching mass determined observationally by Bundy et al. However, its evolution with z is not well constrained, making it difficult to rule out or confirm the need for an additional feedback process such as active galactic nuclei.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef9af1f159b140b908b1350dc6f739eb15ded768

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. L. Hernquist
3. R. Dav'e
4. Volker Springel
5. A. Dekel
6. R. Somerville
7. T. Naab
8. D. Keres̆

Citations in the corpus

• ESCAPE FRACTION OF IONIZING PHOTONS DURING REIONIZATION: EFFECTS DUE TO SUPERNOVA FEEDBACK AND RUNAWAY OB STARS (2014, background): “In order to esti- 2 Given that gas accretion is mostly filamentary (e.g.Ocvirk et al. 2008; Dekel et al. 2009; Kimm et al. 2011b; Stewart et al. 2011), the actual density of the gas that occupies most of the volume in the halo is likely to be even lower than the mean density of the universe, and…”
• AGN-driven quenching of star formation: morphological and dynamical implications for early-type galaxies (2013, background): “1 (Rees & Ostriker 1977; White & Frenk 1991; Birnboim & Dekel 2003; Kereš et al. 2005; Ocvirk et al. 2008; Dekel et al. 2009a; van de Voort et al. 2011).”
• THE ROLE OF COLD FLOWS IN THE ASSEMBLY OF GALAXY DISKS (2008, background): “Recent theoretical work has found that, in fact, the majority of baryons may never reach the virial temperature as they accrete onto galaxies (Birnboim & Dekel 2003; Dekel & Birnboim 2006; Kereš et al. 2005; Ocvirk et al. 2008; Keres et al. 2008; Dekel et al. 2008).”
• Disc formation and the origin of clumpy galaxies at high redshift (2009, background): “Extending recent work on the impact of cold streams on galaxy formation (Kereš et al. 2005; Dekel & Birnboim 2006; Ocvirk et al. 2008; Dekel et al. 2009), we analyse for the first time how single-phase narrow cold streams and ram pressure stripped debris assemble an extended turbulent rotating…”
• THE GASEOUS ENVIRONMENT OF HIGH-z GALAXIES: PRECISION MEASUREMENTS OF NEUTRAL HYDROGEN IN THE CIRCUMGALACTIC MEDIUM OF z ∼ 2–3 GALAXIES IN THE KECK BARYONIC STRUCTURE SURVEY (2012, background): “…masses comparable to the theoretically expected transition mass between “cold mode” and “hot mode” accretion (van de Voort et al. 2011b; Faucher-Giguère et al. 2011; Kereš et al. 2009; Ocvirk et al. 2008); most of these authors predict that both hot and cold accretion occur in such halos atz> 2.”
• ON SIZES, KINEMATICS, M/L GRADIENTS, AND LIGHT PROFILES OF MASSIVE COMPACT GALAXIES AT z ∼ 2 (2010, background): “…simulations suggest that galaxies during the first 3 billion years after the Big Bang were not closed systems, and supply of gas through cold filaments and streams was a generic feature of their evolution (Keres et al. 2005; Dekel & Birnboim 2006; Ocvirk et al. 2008; Dekel et al. 2009a).”
• A model for cosmological simulations of galaxy formation physics: multi-epoch validation (2013, background): “Over the last several years, a large body of results based on hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation have been obtained (e.g., Ocvirk et al. 2008; Crain et al. 2009; Schaye et al. 2010; Davé et al. 2011; McCarthy et al. 2012; Puchwein & Springel 2013; Kannan et al. 2013).”
• Rotational support of giant clumps in high-z disc galaxies (2011, background): “…disc, but the continuous intense streaming of fresh cold gas from the cosmic web into the disc (Birnboim & Dekel 2003; Kereš et al. 2005; Dekel & Birnboim 2006; Ocvirk et al. 2008; Dekel et al. 2009) maintains the high surface density and keeps the instability going for cosmological times (DSC09).”
• Matter power spectrum and the challenge of percent accuracy (2015, unknown): “The code is mainly used for hydrodynamical simulations in a cosmological context (Ocvirk et al. 2008; Agertz et al. 2010) but it has also been employed for pure dark matter N -body runs in the past (Teyssier et al. 2009).”
• GRAVITATIONAL HEATING HELPS MAKE MASSIVE GALAXIES RED AND DEAD (2009, background): “However, in the general three-dimensional case galaxies above the critical shock mass can also be fed with cold gas along filaments penetrating deep inside the hot halo (Ocvirk et al. 2008).”
• MORPHOLOGICAL QUENCHING OF STAR FORMATION: MAKING EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES RED (2009, background): “…shocks of gas infalling in a massive dark matter halo (Birnboim & Dekel 2003; Dekel & Birnboim 2006; Birnboim et al. 2007; Cattaneo et al. 2008; Ocvirk et al. 2008; Kereš et al. 2009), (iii) energy feedback from an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN), which could itself be triggered by galaxy…”
• Extended Lyman-alpha emission from cold accretion streams (2011, background): “…through the diffuse shock-heated medium (Fardal et al. 2001; Birnboim & Dekel 2003; Kereš et al. 2005; Dekel & Birnboim 2006; Birnboim et al. 2007; Ocvirk et al. 2008; Dekel et al. 2009; Brooks et al. 2009; van de Voort et al. 2011b; Faucher-Giguère et al. 2011; van de Voort & Schaye 2011).”
• Star formation sustained by gas accretion (2014, background): “Haloes below ∼ 1012 M are dominated by cold accretion at all redshifts, whereas even high mass galaxies at z > 1 could have some cold accretion in streams that penetrate the surrounding hot haloes (see also Ocvirk et al. 2008; Dekel et al. 2009; Kereš et al. 2009; Stewart et al. 2011a).”
• THE EPOCH OF DISK SETTLING: z ∼ 1 TO NOW (2012, background): “Simulations find that mass accretes directly onto galaxies from cosmic filaments (e.g., Katz et al. 2003; Birnboim & Dekel 2003; Kereŝ et al. 2005; Ocvirk et al. 2008; Brooks et al. 2009).”
• Co-orbiting satellite galaxy structures are still in conflict with the distribution of primordial dwarf galaxies (2014, background): “(vii) Cosmological zoom-in simulations of the cosmic web (e.g. Ocvirk et al. 2008; Ceverino et al. 2010) from which the cold accretion scenario of galaxy mass assembly has been implied Dekel et al. (2009) show that clumpy substructures develop within the gas filaments.”
• Lyα COOLING EMISSION FROM GALAXY FORMATION (2010, background): “…demonstrated in high-resolution three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations (e.g., Fardal et al. 2001; Katz et al. 2003; Kereš et al. 2005, 2009b; Ocvirk et al. 2008; Brooks et al. 2009; Dekel et al. 2009), Binney (1977) had argued on the basis of analytic models of protogalaxy collapse that…”