Principles of supernova-driven winds

Details Principles of supernova-driven winds Principles of supernova-driven winds

2011-11-10

arxiv.org/abs/1111.2529v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

13 pages, 13 figures

Scientific paper

The formation of galaxies is regulated by a balance between the supply of gas and the rate at which it is ejected. Traditional analytical treatments of galactic winds driven by supernovae assume that a fixed fraction of the available energy is used to eject the gas. By a straightforward application of this argument to galaxy formation in the cold dark matter cosmogony, we show that the derived scaling of the wind with circular velocity leads to a relationship between baryon content and galaxy circular velocity that matches recent observational data remarkably well. We test this simple model on a set of gasdynamical simulations of idealised galaxies in dark matter halos of different mass. We find that although the mass outflow in the simulations broadly follows the scaling implied by the model, the model is, in fact, quite inadequate as a description of the overall behaviour of the simulations. By isolating the dominant physical processes at work in limiting cases, we motivate a more comprehensive model that incorporates both momentum-conserving and energy-conserving constraints on the outflow. This formulation provides the physical basis for a more realistic analytical model and can be used to extrapolate simulation results beyond the highest achievable resolution.

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