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Register a new userBars in hydrodynamical cosmological simulations
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Cecilia Scannapieco
Publication date
2012
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
Authors
Cecilia Scannapieco
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We study the properties of two bars formed in fully cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of the formation of Milky Way-mass galaxies. In one case, the bar formed in a system with disc, bulge and halo components and is relatively strong and long, as could be expected for a system where the spheroid strongly influences the evolution. The second bar is less strong, shorter, and formed in a galaxy with no significant bulge component. We study the strength and length of the bars, the stellar density profiles along and across the bars and the velocity fields in the bar region. We compare them with the results of dynamical (idealised) simulations and with observations, and find, in general, a good agreement, although we detect some important differences as well. Our results show that more or less realistic bars can form naturally in a $Lambda$CDM cosmology, and open up the possibility to study the bar formation process in a more consistent way than previously done, since the host galaxies grow, accrete matter and significantly evolve during the formation and evolution of the bar.
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In this work we present a new hybrid method to simulate the thermal effects of the reionization in cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. The method improves upon the standard approach used in simulations of the intergalactic medium (IGM) and galaxy formation without a significant increase of the computational cost allowing for efficient exploration of the parameter space. The method uses a small set of phenomenological input parameters and combines a semi-numerical reionization model to solve for the topology of reionization and an approximate model of how reionization heats the IGM, with the massively parallel texttt{Nyx} hydrodynamics code, specifically designed to solve for the structure of diffuse IGM gas. We have produced several large-scale high resolution cosmological hydrodynamical simulations ($2048^3$, $L_{rm box} = 40$ Mpc/h) with different instantaneous and inhomogeneous HI reionization models that use this new methodology. We study the IGM thermal properties of these models and find that large scale temperature fluctuations extend well beyond the end of reionization. Analyzing the 1D flux power spectrum of these models, we find up to $sim 50%$ differences in the large scale properties (low modes, $klesssim0.01$ s/km) of the post-reionization power spectrum due to the thermal fluctuations. We show that these differences could allow one to distinguish between different reionization scenarios already with existing Ly$alpha$ forest measurements. Finally, we explore the differences in the small-scale cutoff of the power spectrum and we find that, for the same heat input, models show very good agreement provided that the reionization redshift of the instantaneous reionization model happens at the midpoint of the inhomogeneous model.
We have explored the evolution of gas distributions from cosmological simulations carried out using the RAMSES adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code, to explore the effects of resolution on cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. It is vital to understand the effect of both the resolution of initial conditions and the final resolution of the simulation. Lower initial resolution simulations tend to produce smaller numbers of low mass structures. This will strongly affect the assembly history of objects, and has the same effect of simulating different cosmologies. The resolution of initial conditions is an important factor in simulations, even with a fixed maximum spatial resolution. The power spectrum of gas in simulations using AMR diverges strongly from the fixed grid approach - with more power on small scales in the AMR simulations - even at fixed physical resolution and also produces offsets in the star formation at specific epochs. This is because before certain times the upper grid levels are held back to maintain approximately fixed physical resolution, and to mimic the natural evolution of dark matter only simulations. Although the impact of hold back falls with increasing spatial and initial-condition resolutions, the offsets in the star formation remain down to a spatial resolution of 1 kpc. These offsets are of order of 10-20%, which is below the uncertainty in the implemented physics but are expected to affect the detailed properties of galaxies. We have implemented a new grid-hold-back approach to minimize the impact of hold back on the star formation rate.
We present a study of hydrodynamic drag forces in smoothed particle simulations. In particular, the deceleration of a resolution-limited cold clump of gas moving through a hot medium is examined. It is found that the drag for subsonic velocities exceeds that predicted by simple physical approximations. This is shown to be a result of the hydrodynamical method which encourages the accretion of particles from the hot medium onto a shell around the cold clump, effectively increasing the radius of the clump. For sonic and supersonic velocities, the drag is shown to be dependent on the effective cross section of the clump. The consequences for cosmological simulations are discussed.
We examine the chemical properties of 5 cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of an M33-like disc galaxy which have been shown to be consistent with the morphological characteristics and bulk scaling relations expected of late-type spirals. These simulations are part of the Making Galaxies In a Cosmological Context (MaGICC) Project, in which stellar feedback is tuned to match the stellar mass -- halo mass relationship. Each realisation employed identical initial conditions and assembly histories, but differed from one another in their underlying baryonic physics prescriptions, including (a) the efficiency with which each supernova energy couples to the ISM, (b) the impact of feedback associated with massive star radiation pressure, (c) the role of the minimum shut-off time for radiative cooling of Type II SNe remnants, (d) the treatment of metal diffusion, and (e) varying the IMF. Our analysis focusses on the resulting stellar metallicity distribution functions (MDFs) in each simulated (analogous) `solar neighbourhood and central `bulge region. We compare the simulated MDFs skewness, kurtosis, and dispersion (inter-quartile, inter-decile, inter-centile, and inter-tenth-percentile regions) with that of the empirical solar neighbourhood MDF and Local Group dwarfs. We find that the MDFs of the simulated discs are more negatively skewed, with higher kurtosis, than those observed locally. We can trace this difference to the simulations tight and correlated age-metallicity relations (compared with that of the Milky Way), suggesting that these relations within `dwarf discs might be steeper than in L* discs and/or the degree of stellar orbital re-distribution and migration inferred locally has not been captured in their entirety, at the resolution of our simulations. The important role of metal diffusion in ameliorating the over-production of extremely metal-poor stars is highlighted.
We explored the role of X-ray binaries composed by a black hole and a massive stellar companion (BHXs) as sources of kinetic feedback by using hydrodynamical cosmological simulations. Following previous results, our BHX model selects low metal-poor stars ($Z = [0,10^{-4}]$) as possible progenitors. The model that better reproduces observations assumes that a $sim 20%$ fraction of low-metallicity black holes are in binary systems which produce BHXs. These sources are estimated to deposit $sim 10^{52}$ erg of kinetic energy per event. With these parameters and in the simulated volume, we find that the energy injected by BHXs represents $sim 30%$ of the total energy released by SNII and BHX events at redshift $zsim7$ and then decreases rapidly as baryons get chemically enriched. Haloes with virial masses smaller than $sim 10^{10} ,M_{odot}$ (or $T_{rm vir} lesssim 10^5 $ K) are the most directly affected ones by BHX feedback. These haloes host galaxies with stellar masses in the range $10^7 - 10^8$ M$_odot$. Our results show that BHX feedback is able to keep the interstellar medium warm, without removing a significant gas fraction, in agreement with previous analytical calculations. Consequently, the stellar-to-dark matter mass ratio is better reproduced at high redshift. Our model also predicts a stronger evolution of the number of galaxies as a function of the stellar mass with redshift when BHX feedback is considered. These findings support previous claims that the BHXs could be an effective source of feedback in early stages of galaxy evolution.
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