Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2011-11-28
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
8 pages, 3 figures, submitted to MNRAS. Movies of the simulations are available at https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~phopkins/Site/
Scientific paper
We use numerical simulations of isolated galaxies to study the effects of realistic stellar feedback on the formation and evolution of giant star-forming gas 'clumps' in high-redshift, gas-rich galaxies. Such galactic disks are unstable to the formation of bound gas-rich clumps whose properties initially depend only on global disk properties, not the microphysics of feedback. In simulations without stellar feedback, clumps turn an order-unity fraction of their mass into stars and sink to the center, forming a large bulge and kicking most of the stars out into a much more extended stellar envelope. By contrast, stellar feedback disrupts even the most massive clumps after they turn ~10-20% of their mass into stars, in a timescale of ~10-100 Myr, ejecting some material into a super-wind and recycling the rest of the gas into the diffuse ISM. This suppresses the bulge formation rate by direct 'clump coalescence' by a factor of several. However, the galactic disks do undergo significant secular evolution in the absence of mergers: clumps form and disrupt continuously and torque gas to the galactic center. The resulting evolution is qualitatively similar to bar/spiral evolution in simulations with a more homogeneous ISM.
Hernquist Lars
Hopkins Philip F.
Keres Dusan
Murray Norman
Quataert Eliot
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