No Arabic abstract
Although galactic winds play a critical role in regulating galaxy formation, hydrodynamic cosmological simulations do not resolve the scales that govern the interaction between winds and the ambient circumgalactic medium (CGM). We implement the Physically Evolved Wind (PhEW) model of Huang et al. (2020) in the GIZMO hydrodynamics code and perform test cosmological simulations with different choices of model parameters and numerical resolution. PhEW adopts an explicit subgrid model that treats each wind particle as a collection of clouds that exchange mass, metals, and momentum with their surroundings and evaporate by conduction and hydrodynamic instabilities as calibrated on much higher resolution cloud scale simulations. In contrast to a conventional wind algorithm, we find that PhEW results are robust to numerical resolution and implementation details because the small scale interactions are defined by the model itself. Compared to conventional wind simulations with the same resolution, our PhEW simulations produce similar galaxy stellar mass functions at $zgeq 1$ but are in better agreement with low-redshift observations at $M_* < 10^{11}M_odot$ because PhEW particles shed mass to the CGM before escaping low mass halos. PhEW radically alters the CGM metal distribution because PhEW particles disperse metals to the ambient medium as their clouds dissipate, producing a CGM metallicity distribution that is skewed but unimodal and is similar between cold and hot gas. While the temperature distributions and radial profiles of gaseous halos are similar in simulations with PhEW and conventional winds, these changes in metal distribution will affect their predicted UV/X-ray properties in absorption and emission.
The propagation and evolution of cold galactic winds in galactic haloes is crucial to galaxy formation models. However, modelling of this process in hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation is over-simplified owing to a lack of numerical resolution and often neglects critical physical processes such as hydrodynamic instabilities and thermal conduction. We propose an analytic model, Physically Evolved Winds (PhEW), that calculates the evolution of individual clouds moving supersonically through a uniform ambient medium. Our model reproduces predictions from very high resolution cloud-crushing simulations that include isotropic thermal conduction over a wide range of physical conditions. We discuss the implementation of this model into cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation as a sub-grid prescription to model galactic winds more robustly both physically and numerically.
Over the last decades, cosmological simulations of galaxy formation have been instrumental for advancing our understanding of structure and galaxy formation in the Universe. These simulations follow the non-linear evolution of galaxies modeling a variety of physical processes over an enormous range of scales. A better understanding of the physics relevant for shaping galaxies, improved numerical methods, and increased computing power have led to simulations that can reproduce a large number of observed galaxy properties. Modern simulations model dark matter, dark energy, and ordinary matter in an expanding space-time starting from well-defined initial conditions. The modeling of ordinary matter is most challenging due to the large array of physical processes affecting this matter component. Cosmological simulations have also proven useful to study alternative cosmological models and their impact on the galaxy population. This review presents a concise overview of the methodology of cosmological simulations of galaxy formation and their different applications.
We present a new comprehensive model of the physics of galaxy formation designed for large-scale hydrodynamical simulations of structure formation using the moving mesh code AREPO. Our model includes primordial and metal line cooling with self-shielding corrections, stellar evolution and feedback processes, gas recycling, chemical enrichment, a novel subgrid model for the metal loading of outflows, black hole (BH) seeding, BH growth and merging procedures, quasar- and radio-mode feedback, and a prescription for radiative electro-magnetic (EM) feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN). The metal mass loading of outflows can be adjusted independently of the wind mass loading. This is required to simultaneously reproduce the stellar mass content of low mass haloes and their gas oxygen abundances. Radiative EM AGN feedback is implemented assuming an average spectral energy distribution and a luminosity-dependent scaling of obscuration effects. This form of feedback suppresses star formation more efficiently than continuous thermal quasar-mode feedback alone, but is less efficient than mechanical radio-mode feedback in regulating star formation in massive haloes. We contrast simulation predictions for different variants of our galaxy formation model with key observations. Our best match model reproduces, among other things, the cosmic star formation history, the stellar mass function, the stellar mass - halo mass relation, g-, r-, i-, z-band SDSS galaxy luminosity functions, and the Tully-Fisher relation. We can achieve this success only if we invoke very strong forms of stellar and AGN feedback such that star formation is adequately reduced in both low and high mass systems. In particular, the strength of radio-mode feedback needs to be increased significantly compared to previous studies to suppress efficient cooling in massive, metal-enriched haloes.
We investigate the differential effects of metal cooling and galactic stellar winds on the cosmological formation of individual galaxies with three sets of cosmological, hydrodynamical zoom simulations of 45 halos in the mass range 10^11<M_halo<10^13M_sun. Models including both galactic winds and metal cooling (i) suppress early star formation at z>1 and predict reasonable star formation histories, (ii) produce galaxies with high cold gas fractions (30-60 per cent) at high redshift, (iii) significantly reduce the galaxy formation efficiencies for halos (M_halo<10^12M_sun) at all redshifts in agreement with observational and abundance matching constraints, (iv) result in high-redshift galaxies with reduced circular velocities matching the observed Tully-Fisher relation at z~2, and (v) significantly increase the sizes of low-mass galaxies (M_stellar<3x10^10M_sun) at high redshift resulting in a weak size evolution - a trend in agreement with observations. However, the low redshift (z<0.5) star formation rates of massive galaxies are higher than observed (up to ten times). No tested model predicts the observed size evolution for low-mass and high-mass galaxies simultaneously. Due to the delayed onset of star formation in the wind models, the metal enrichment of gas and stars is delayed and agrees well with observational constraints. Metal cooling and stellar winds are both found to increase the ratio of in situ formed to accreted stars - the relative importance of dissipative vs. dissipationless assembly. For halo masses below ~10^12M_sun, this is mainly caused by less stellar accretion and compares well to predictions from semi-analytical models but still differs from abundance matching models. For higher masses, the fraction of in situ stars is over-predicted due to the unrealistically high star formation rates at low redshifts.
We present cosmological zoom-in hydro-dynamical simulations for the formation of disc galaxies, implementing dust evolution and dust promoted cooling of hot gas. We couple an improved version of our previous treatment of dust evolution, which adopts the two-size approximation to estimate the grain size distribution, with the MUPPI star formation and feedback sub-resolution model. Our dust evolution model follows carbon and silicate dust separately. To distinguish differences induced by the chaotic behaviour of simulations from those genuinely due to different simulation set-up, we run each model six times, after introducing tiny perturbations in the initial conditions. With this method, we discuss the role of various dust-related physical processes and the effect of a few possible approximations adopted in the literature. Metal depletion and dust cooling affect the evolution of the system, causing substantial variations in its stellar, gas and dust content. We discuss possible effects on the Spectral Energy Distribution of the significant variations of the size distribution and chemical composition of grains, as predicted by our simulations during the evolution of the galaxy. We compare dust surface density, dust-to-gas ratio and small-to-big grain mass ratio as a function of galaxy radius and gas metallicity predicted by our fiducial run with recent observational estimates for three disc galaxies of different masses. The general agreement is good, in particular taking into account that we have not adjusted our model for this purpose.