Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2010-12-14
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
23 pages, 14 figures. MNRAS accepted. Added Sec. 4.4 and significantly modified the Discussion at the suggestion of the refere
Scientific paper
Massive galaxies today typically are not forming stars despite being surrounded by hot gaseous halos with short central cooling times. This likely owes to some form of "quenching feedback" such as merger-driven quasar activity or radio jets emerging from central black holes. Here we implement heuristic prescriptions for these phenomena on-the-fly within cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. We constrain them by comparing to observed luminosity functions and color-magnitude diagrams from SDSS. We find that quenching from mergers alone does not produce a realistic red sequence, because 1 - 2 Gyr after a merger the remnant accretes new fuel and star formation reignites. In contrast, quenching by continuously adding thermal energy to hot gaseous halos quantitatively matches the red galaxy luminosity function and produces a reasonable red sequence. Small discrepancies remain - a shallow red sequence slope suggests that our models underestimate metal production or retention in massive red galaxies, while a deficit of massive blue galaxies may reflect the fact that observed heating is intermittent rather than continuous. Overall, injection of energy into hot halo gas appears to be a necessary and sufficient condition to broadly produce red and dead massive galaxies as observed.
Dav'e Romeel
Finlator Kristian
Gabor Jared M.
Oppenheimer Benjamin Darwin
No associations
LandOfFree
Quenching Massive Galaxies with On-the-fly Feedback in Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.
If you have personal experience with Quenching Massive Galaxies with On-the-fly Feedback in Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Quenching Massive Galaxies with On-the-fly Feedback in Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-12919