Wet Disc Contraction to Galactic Blue Nuggets and Quenching to Red Nuggets

By A. Dekel, A. Burkert. 2013

350 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the origin of high-redshift, compact, quenched spheroids (red nuggets) through the dissipative shrinkage of gaseous discs into compact star-forming systems (blue nuggets). The discs, fed by cold streams, undergo violent disc instability (VDI) that drives gas into the centre (along with mergers). The inflow is dissipative when its timescale is shorter than the star formation timescale. This implies a threshold of 0.28 in the cold-to-total mass ratio within the disc radius. For the typical gas fraction 0.5 at z=2, this threshold is traced back to a maximum spin parameter of 0.05, implying that half the star-forming galaxies contract to blue nuggets, while the rest form extended stellar discs. Thus, the surface density of blue galaxies is expected to be bimodal about 10^9 Msun/kpc^2, slightly increasing with mass. Blue nuggets are expected to be rare at low z when the gas fraction is low. The blue nuggets quench to red nuggets by complementary internal and external mechanisms. Internal quenching by a compact bulge, operating as a fast mode and especially at high z, may involve starbursts, stellar and AGN feedback, or Q-quenching. Quenching due to hot-medium haloes above 10^{12} Msun provides maintenance and a slower mode at low redshift. These predictions are confirmed in simulations and are consistent with observations at z=0-3.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/efd2c797f6283ceaad1393a8e1beb171c11d4a00

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Citations in the corpus

Structural and Star-forming Relations since z ∼ 3: Connecting Compact Star-forming and Quiescent Galaxies (2015, background): “…with dissipational processes ranging from major mergers (Hopkins et al. 2006; Hopkins et al. 2008), to violent gravitational instabilities (Dekel et al. 2009a; Dekel & Burkert 2014; Ceverino et al. 2010), and weaker secular instabilities (e.g., bars and spiral arms; Kormendy & Kennicutt 2004).”
FORMING COMPACT MASSIVE GALAXIES (2015, methodology): “…(Oser et al. 2010; Johansson, Naab, & Ostriker 2012; Williams et al. 2014; Nelson et al. 2014; Wellons et al. 2015), “compaction” of the gas in star forming galaxies due to disk instabilities (Dekel & Burkert 2014), and hybrid models that include several of these effects (Zolotov et al. 2015).”
3D-HST+CANDELS: THE EVOLUTION OF THE GALAXY SIZE–MASS DISTRIBUTION SINCE z = 3 (2014, positive): “This would suggest the continuous emergence of additional, small late-type galaxies that represent a transitional phase between the bulk of the late-type population and the early-type population, as recently advocated by Dekel & Burkert (2014) based on analytical arguments and simulations.”
Compaction and quenching of high-z galaxies in cosmological simulations: blue and red nuggets (2014, background): “Dekel & Burkert (2014) considered the process of VDIdriven wet compaction in the dark-matter dominated regime.”
The confinement of star-forming galaxies into a main sequence through episodes of gas compaction, depletion and replenishment (2015, methodology): “The compaction is triggered by an intense inflow episode, involving mergers, counter-rotating streams or recycled gas (Dekel & Burkert 2014), and can be associated with violent disc instability (VDI; Noguchi 1999; Gammie 2001; Bournaud et al. 2007; Dekel et al. 2009b; Burkert et al. 2010; Bournaud…”
Evolution of density profiles in high-z galaxies: compaction and quenching inside-out (2015, background): “As mentioned in the Introduction, minor mergers, counterrotating streams, recycling and tidal compression drive the gas compaction, possibly through VDI, into a compact, starforming blue nugget (Dekel & Burkert 2014; Zolotov et al. 2015).”
Deriving Physical Properties from Broadband Photometry with Prospector: Description of the Model and a Demonstration of its Accuracy Using 129 Galaxies in the Local Universe (2016, background): “…2014; Torrey et al. 2014; Furlong et al. 2015), semi-analytical models (e.g., Mitchell et al. 2014; Henriques et al. 2015), and pure analytic models (e.g., Lilly et al. 2013; Dekel & Burkert 2014) are all systematically offset from observations of masses, SFRs, or both at the level of 0.2–0.5 dex.”
Four phases of angular-momentum buildup in high-z galaxies: from cosmic-web streams through an extended ring to disc and bulge (2014, background): “It has been argued by Dekel & Burkert (2014) that the original spin parameter of the gas disc, which determines the initial gas surface density in the disc, determines whether the gas inflow rate is faster or slower than the SFR.”
Introducing the Illustris Project: the evolution of galaxy populations across cosmic time (2014, background): “Dekel & Burkert (2014) provide a theoretical framework for these two scenarios, where gas-rich discs (corresponding to low-spin parameters) undergo disc instabilities that make them contract and evolve on the ‘early track’, while less gas-rich discs quench on the ‘late track’ without contracting…”
The size evolution of star-forming and quenched galaxies in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, background): “Third, gravitational instabilities inside galaxies themselves may lead to changes in size, as mass flows towards the galaxy center (Efstathiou et al. 1982; Dekel & Burkert 2014).”
Constraining the galaxy–halo connection over the last 13.3 Gyr: star formation histories, galaxy mergers and structural properties (2017, background): “…asserts that shrinkage of the effective radius arises from central starbursts fed by dissipative processes, driven by violent disc instabilities (Dekel & Burkert 2014), possibly triggered by major or minor mergers (Inoue et al. 2016), that could only happen at higher redshifts when the gas…”