Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2010-03-17
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
Accepted for publication by MNRAS Letters
Scientific paper
Observations indicate that roughly 60% of the baryons may exist in a Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM) at low redshifts. Following up on previous results showing that gas is released through galaxy mergers, we use a semi-analytic technique to estimate the fraction of gas mass lost from haloes solely due to mergers. We find that up to ~25% of the gas in a halo can unbind over the course of galaxy assembly. This process does not act preferentially on smaller mass haloes; bigger haloes \emph{always} release larger amounts of gas in a given volume of the Universe. However, if we include multi-phase gas accretion onto haloes, we find that only a few percent is unbound. We conclude that either non-gravitational processes may be in play to heat up the gas in the galaxies prior to unbinding by mergers or most of the baryons in the WHIM have never fallen into virialised dark matter haloes. We present a budget for stocking the WHIM compiled from recent work.
Holley-Bockelmann Kelly
Sinha Manodeep
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