No Arabic abstract
The massive galaxies in the young universe, ten billion years ago, formed stars at surprising intensities. Although this is commonly attributed to violent mergers, the properties of many of these galaxies are incompatible with such events, showing gas-rich, clumpy, extended rotating disks not dominated by spheroids (Genzel et al. 2006, 2008). Cosmological simulations and clustering theory are used to explore how these galaxies acquired their gas. Here we report that they are stream-fed galaxies, formed from steady, narrow, cold gas streams that penetrate the shock-heated media of massive dark matter haloes (Dekel & Birnboim 2006; Keres et al. 2005). A comparison with the observed abundance of star-forming galaxies implies that most of the input gas must rapidly convert to stars. One-third of the stream mass is in gas clumps leading to mergers of mass ratio greater than 1:10, and the rest is in smoother flows. With a merger duy cycle of 0.1, three-quarters of the galaxies forming stars at a given rate are fed by smooth streams. The rarer, submillimetre galaxies that form stars even more intensely are largely merger-induced starbursts. Unlike destructive mergers, the streams are likely to keep the rotating disk configuration intact, although turbulent and broken into giant star-forming clumps that merge into a central spheroid (Noguchi 1999; Genzel et al. 2008, Elmegreen, Bournaud & Elmegreen 2008, Dekel, Sari & Ceverino 2009). This stream-driven scenario for the formation of disks and spheroids is an alternative to the merger picture.
Using the exquisite depth of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF12 programme) dataset, we explore the ongoing assembly of the outermost regions of the most massive galaxies ($rm M_{rm stellar}geq$ 5$times$10$^{10}$ M$_{odot}$) at $z leq$ 1. The outskirts of massive objects, particularly Early-Types Galaxies (ETGs), are expected to suffer a dramatic transformation across cosmic time due to continuous accretion of small galaxies. HUDF imaging allows us to study this process at intermediate redshifts in 6 massive galaxies, exploring the individual surface brightness profiles out to $sim$25 effective radii. We find that 5-20% of the total stellar mass for the galaxies in our sample is contained within 10 $< R <$ 50 kpc. These values are in close agreement with numerical simulations, and higher than those reported for local late-type galaxies ($lesssim$5%). The fraction of stellar mass stored in the outer envelopes/haloes of Massive Early-Type Galaxies increases with decreasing redshift, being 28.7% at $< z > =$ 0.1, 15.1% at $< z > =$ 0.65 and 3.5% at $< z > =$ 2. The fraction of mass in diffuse features linked with ongoing minor merger events is $>$ 1-2%, very similar to predictions based on observed close pair counts. Therefore, the results for our small albeit meaningful sample suggest that the size and mass growth of the most massive galaxies have been solely driven by minor and major merging from $z =$ 1 to today.
The Lyman-alpha (Lya) emission has played an important role in detecting high-redshift galaxies, including recently distant ones at redshift z > 7. It may also contain important information on the origin of these galaxies. Here, we investigate the formation of a typical L* galaxy and its observational signatures at the earliest stage, by combining a cosmological hydrodynamic simulation with three-dimensional radiative transfer calculations using the newly improved ART^2 code. Our cosmological simulation uses the Aquila initial condition which zooms in onto a Milky Way-like halo with high resolutions, and our radiative transfer couples multi-wavelength continuum, Lya line, and ionization of hydrogen. We find that the modeled galaxy starts to form at redshift z ~ 24 through efficient accretion of cold gas, which produces a strong Lya line with a luminosity of L(Lya) ~ 10^42 erg/s as early as z ~ 14. The Lya emission appears to trace the cold, dense gas. The lines exhibit asymmetric, single-peak profiles, and are shifted to the blue wing, a characteristic feature of gas inflow. Moreover, the contribution to the total Lya luminosity by excitation cooling increases with redshift, and it becomes dominant at z >~ 6. We predict that L* galaxies such as the modeled one may be detected at z <~ 8 by JWST and ALMA with a reasonable integration time. Beyond redshift 12, however, only Lya line may be observable by spectroscopic surveys. Our results suggest that Lya line is one of the most powerful tools to detect the first generation of galaxies, and to decipher their formation mechanism.
We study the impact of numerical parameters on the properties of cold dark matter haloes formed in collisionless cosmological simulations. We quantify convergence in the median spherically-averaged circular velocity profiles for haloes of widely varying particle number, as well as in the statistics of their structural scaling relations and mass functions. In agreement with prior work focused on single haloes, our results suggest that cosmological simulations yield robust halo properties for a wide range of gravitational softening parameters, $epsilon$, provided: 1) $epsilon$ is not larger than a convergence radius, $r_{rm conv}$, which is dictated by 2-body relaxation and determined by particle number, and 2) a sufficient number of timesteps are taken to accurately resolve particle orbits with short dynamical times. Provided these conditions are met, median circular velocity profiles converge to within $approx 10$ per cent for radii beyond which the local 2-body relaxation timescale exceeds the Hubble time by a factor $kappaequiv t_{rm relax}/t_{rm H}gt 0.177$, with better convergence attained for higher $kappa$. We provide analytic estimates of $r_{rm conv}$ that build on previous attempts in two ways: first, by highlighting its explicit (but weak) softening-dependence and, second, by providing a simpler criterion in which $r_{rm conv}$ is determined entirely by the mean inter-particle spacing, $l$; for example, better than $10$ per cent convergence in circular velocity for $rgt 0.05,l$. We show how these analytic criteria can be used to assess convergence in structural scaling relations for dark matter haloes as a function of their mass or maximum circular speed.
We present 1.3 mm ALMA dust polarization observations at a resolution of $sim$0.02 pc of three massive molecular clumps, MM1, MM4, and MM9, in the infrared dark cloud G28.34+0.06. With the sensitive and high-resolution continuum data, MM1 is resolved into a cluster of condensations. The magnetic field structure in each clump is revealed by the polarized emission. We found a trend of decreasing polarized emission fraction with increasing Stokes $I$ intensities in MM1 and MM4. Using the angular dispersion function method (a modified Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi method), the plane-of-sky magnetic field strength in two massive dense cores, MM1-Core1 and MM4-Core4, are estimated to be $sim$1.6 mG and $sim$0.32 mG, respectively. textbf{The ordered magnetic energy is found to be smaller than the turbulent energy in the two cores, while the total magnetic energy is found to be comparable to the turbulent energy.} The total virial parameters in MM1-Core1 and MM4-Core4 are calculated to be $sim$0.76 and $sim$0.37, respectively, suggesting that massive star formation does not start in equilibrium. Using the polarization-intensity gradient-local gravity method, we found that the local gravity is closely aligned with intensity gradient in the three clumps, and the magnetic field tends to be aligned with the local gravity in MM1 and MM4 except for regions near the emission peak, which suggests that the gravity plays a dominant role in regulating the gas collapse. Half of the outflows in MM4 and MM9 are found to be aligned within 10$^{circ}$ of the condensation-scale ($<$0.05 pc) magnetic field, indicating that the magnetic field could play an important role from condensation to disk scale in the early stage of massive star formation. We also found that the fragmentation in MM1-Core1 cannot be solely explained by thermal Jeans fragmentation or turbulent Jeans fragmentation.
Using adiabatic hydrodynamical simulations, we follow the evolution of two symmetric cold fronts developing in the remnant of a violent z=0.3 massive cluster merger. The structure and location of the simulated cold fronts are very similar to those recently found in X-ray cluster observations, supporting the merger hypothesis for the origin of at least some of the cold fronts. The cold fronts are preceded by an almost spherical bow shock which originates at the core and disappears after 1.6 Gyr. The cold fronts last longer and survive until z=0. We trace back the gas mass constituting the fronts and find it initially associated with the two dense cores of the merging clusters. Conversely, we follow how the energy of the gas of the initial merging cores evolves until z=0 from the merging and show that a fraction of this gas can escape from the local potential well of the sub-clumps. This release occurs as the sub-clumps reach their apocentre in an eccentric orbit and is due to decoupling between the dark matter and part of the gas in the sub-clump because of, first, heating of the gas at first close core passage and of, second, the effect of the global cluster pressure which peaks as the centrifugal acceleration of the sub-clump is maximal. The fraction of the gas of the sub-clump liberated in the outbound direction then cools as it expands adiabatically and constitutes the cold fronts.