No Arabic abstract
We introduce a dust model for cosmological simulations implemented in the moving-mesh code AREPO and present a suite of cosmological hydrodynamical zoom-in simulations to study dust formation within galactic haloes. Our model accounts for the stellar production of dust, accretion of gas-phase metals onto existing grains, destruction of dust through local supernova activity, and dust driven by winds from star-forming regions. We find that accurate stellar and active galactic nuclei feedback is needed to reproduce the observed dust-metallicity relation and that dust growth largely dominates dust destruction. Our simulations predict a dust content of the interstellar medium which is consistent with observed scaling relations at $z = 0$, including scalings between dust-to-gas ratio and metallicity, dust mass and gas mass, dust-to-gas ratio and stellar mass, and dust-to-stellar mass ratio and gas fraction. We find that roughly two-thirds of dust at $z = 0$ originated from Type II supernovae, with the contribution from asymptotic giant branch stars below 20 per cent for $z gtrsim 5$. While our suite of Milky Way-sized galaxies forms dust in good agreement with a number of key observables, it predicts a high dust-to-metal ratio in the circumgalactic medium, which motivates a more realistic treatment of thermal sputtering of grains and dust cooling channels.
(Abridged) We study the polarisation properties, magnetic field strength, and synchrotron emission scale-height of Milky-Way-like galaxies in comparison with other spiral galaxies. We use our 3D-emission model of the Milky Way Galaxy for viewing the Milky Way from outside at various inclinations as spiral galaxies are observed. When seen edge-on the synchrotron emission from the Milky Way has an exponential scale-height of about 0.74 kpc, which is much smaller than the values obtained from previous models. We find that current analysis methods overestimate the scale-height of synchrotron emission of galaxies by about 10% at an inclination of 80 degree and about 40% at an inclination of 70 degree because of contamination from the disk. The observed RMs for face-on galaxies derived from high-frequency polarisation measurements approximate to the Faraday depths (FDs) when scaled by a factor of two. For edge-on galaxies, the observed RMs are indicative of the orientation of the large-scale magnetic field, but are not well related with the FDs. Assuming energy equipartition between the magnetic field and particles for the Milky Way results in an average magnetic-field strength, which is about two times larger than the intrinsic value for a K factor of 100. The number distribution of the integrated polarisation percentages of a large sample of unresolved Milky-Way-like galaxies peaks at about 4.2% at 4.8 GHz and at about 0.8% at 1.4GHz. Integrated polarisation angles rotated by 90 degree align very well with the position angles of the major axes, implying that unresolved galaxies do not have intrinsic RMs.
We review progress over the past decade in observations of large-scale star formation, with a focus on the interface between extragalactic and Galactic studies. Methods of measuring gas contents and star formation rates are discussed, and updated prescriptions for calculating star formation rates are provided. We review relations between star formation and gas on scales ranging from entire galaxies to individual molecular clouds.
We investigate the chemical and kinematic properties of the diffuse stellar haloes of six simulated Milky Way-like galaxies from the Aquarius Project. Binding energy criteria are adopted to defined two dynamically distinct stellar populations: the diffuse inner and outer haloes, which comprise different stellar sub-populations with particular chemical and kinematic characteristics. Our simulated inner- and outer-halo stellar populations have received contributions from debris stars (formed in sub-galactic systems while they were outside the virial radius of the main progenitor galaxies) and endo-debris stars (those formed in gas-rich sub-galactic systems inside the dark matter haloes). The inner haloes possess an additional contribution from disc-heated stars in the range $sim 3 - 30 %$, with a mean of $sim 20% $. Disc-heated stars might exhibit signatures of kinematical support, in particular among the youngest ones. Endo-debris plus disc-heated stars define the so-called insitu stellar populations. In both the inner- and outer-halo stellar populations, we detect contributions from stars with moderate to low [$alpha$/Fe] ratios, mainly associated with the endo-debris or disc-heated sub-populations. The observed abundance gradients in the inner-halo regions are influenced by both the level of chemical enrichment and the relative contributions from each stellar sub-population. Steeper abundance gradients in the inner-halo regions are related to contributions from the disc-heated and endo-debris stars, which tend to be found at lower binding energies than debris stars. (Abridged).
We conduct a comprehensive and statistical study of the luminosity functions (LFs) for satellite galaxies, by counting photometric galaxies from HSC, DECaLS and SDSS around isolated central galaxies (ICGs) and paired galaxies from the SDSS/DR7 spectroscopic sample. Results of different surveys show very good agreement. The satellite LFs can be measured down to $M_Vsim-10$, and for central primary galaxies as small as $8.5<log_{10}M_ast/M_odot<9.2$ and $9.2<log_{10}M_ast/M_odot<9.9$, implying there are on average 3--8 satellites with $M_V<-10$ around LMC-mass ICGs. The bright end cutoff of satellite LFs and the satellite abundance are both sensitive to the magnitude gap between the primary and its companions, indicating galaxy systems with larger magnitude gaps are on average hosted by less massive dark matter haloes. By selecting primaries with stellar mass similar to our MW, we discovered that i) the averaged satellite LFs of ICGs with different magnitude gaps to their companions and of galaxy pairs with different colour or colour combinations all show steeper slopes than the MW satellite LF; ii) there are on average more satellites with $-15<M_V<-10$ than those in our MW; iii) there are on average 1.5 to 2.5 satellites with $M_V<-16$ around ICGs, consistent with our MW; iv) even after accounting for the large scatter predicted by numerical simulations, the MW satellite LF is uncommon at $M_V>-12$. Hence the MW and its satellite system are statistically atypical of our sample of MW-mass systems. In consequence, our MW is not a good representative of other MW-mass galaxies. Strong cosmological implications based on only MW satellites await additional discoveries of fainter satellites in extra-galactic systems. Interestingly, the MW satellite LF is typical among other MW-mass systems within 40~Mpc in the local Universe, perhaps implying the Local Volume is an under-dense region.
The magnetic fields observed in the Milky~Way and nearby galaxies appear to be in equipartition with the turbulent, thermal, and cosmic ray energy densities, and hence are expected to be dynamically important. However, the origin of these strong magnetic fields is still unclear, and most previous attempts to simulate galaxy formation from cosmological initial conditions have ignored them altogether. Here, we analyse the magnetic fields predicted by the simulations of the Auriga Project, a set of 30 high-resolution cosmological zoom simulations of Milky~Way-like galaxies, carried out with a moving-mesh magneto-hydrodynamics code and a detailed galaxy formation physics model. We find that the magnetic fields grow exponentially at early times owing to a small-scale dynamo with an e-folding time of roughly $100,rm{Myr}$ in the center of halos until saturation occurs around $z=2-3$, when the magnetic energy density reaches about $10%$ of the turbulent energy density with a typical strength of $10-50,rm{mu G}$. In the galactic centers the ratio between magnetic and turbulent energy remains nearly constant until $z=0$. At larger radii, differential rotation in the disks leads to linear amplification that typically saturates around $z=0.5$ to $z=0$. The final radial and vertical variations of the magnetic field strength can be well described by two joint exponential profiles, and are in good agreement with observational constraints. Overall, the magnetic fields have only little effect on the global evolution of the galaxies as it takes too long to reach equipartition. We also demonstrate that our results are well converged with numerical resolution.