(Star)bursts of FIRE: observational signatures of bursty star formation in galaxies

By M. Sparre, C. Hayward, Robert Feldmann, C. Faucher-Giguére, A. Muratov, D. Kerevs, P. Hopkins. 2015

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Galaxy formation models are now able to reproduce observed relations such as the relation between galaxies’ star formation rates (SFRs) and stellar masses (M^*) and the stellar-mass–halo-mass relation. We demonstrate that comparisons of the short-time-scale variability in galaxy SFRs with observational data provide an additional useful constraint on the physics of galaxy formation feedback. We apply SFR indicators with different sensitivity time-scales to galaxies from the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) simulations. We find that the SFR–M* relation has a significantly greater scatter when the Hα-derived SFR is considered compared with when the far-ultraviolet (FUV)-based SFR is used. This difference is a direct consequence of bursty star formation because the FIRE galaxies exhibit order-of-magnitude SFR variations over time-scales of a few Myr. We show that the difference in the scatter between the simulated Hα- and FUV-derived SFR–M^* relations at z = 2 is consistent with observational constraints. We also find that the Hα/FUV ratios predicted by the simulations at z = 0 are similar to those observed for local galaxies except for a population of low-mass (M* ≲ 10^(9.5) M_⊙) simulated galaxies with lower Hα/FUV ratios than observed. We suggest that future cosmological simulations should compare the Hα/FUV ratios of their galaxies with observations to constrain the feedback models employed.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f02e1731e4395cd6704428b2cc298daf261c0d1d

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Citations in the corpus

The Auriga Project: the properties and formation mechanisms of disc galaxies across cosmic time (2016, background): “…very strong radiation pressure feedback from stars is of fundamental importance and regulates star formation in a bursty fashion (e.g. Okamoto 2013; Sparre et al. 2017), although it is unclear whether radiation pressure is able to play such an important role in reality, given the porous structure…”
The Local Group on FIRE: dwarf galaxy populations across a suite of hydrodynamic simulations (2018, background): “…and stellar/supernovae feedback that self-consistently yield bursty star formation in dwarf galaxies (Muratov et al. 2015; El-Badry et al. 2016; Sparre et al. 2017; Faucher-Giguère 2018) and overall agreement with a variety of galaxy-scale observables, including the star formation histories…”
FIRE-2 simulations: physics versus numerics in galaxy formation (2017, background): ““Bursty” star formation predominates in low-mass dwarfs and high-redshift progenitors of massive galaxies (Sparre et al. 2017; Faucher-Giguère 2018), and in galactic nuclei (Torrey et al. 2017).”
The HDUV Survey: A Revised Assessment of the Relationship between UV Slope and Dust Attenuation for High-redshift Galaxies (2017, background): “…and star-formation history on the UV slope may become important for ultra-faint galaxies at high redshift which have been suggested to undergo bursty star formation (e.g., Weisz et al. 2012; Hopkins et al. 2014; Domı́nguez et al. 2015; Guo et al. 2016; Sparre et al. 2017; Faucher-Giguere 2017).”
UniverseMachine: The correlation between galaxy growth and dark matter halo assembly from z = 0−10 (2018, background): “However, simulations suggest that short-timescale variations are nonetheless common (e.g., Sparre et al. 2017).”