We present results from high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations of isolated SMC- and Milky Way-sized galaxies that include a model for feedback from galactic cosmic rays (CRs). We find that CRs are naturally able to drive winds with mass loading fac
tors of up to ~10 in dwarf systems. The scaling of the mass loading factor with circular velocity between the two simulated systems is consistent with propto v_c^{1-2} required to reproduce the faint end of the galaxy luminosity function. In addition, simulations with CR feedback reproduce both the normalization and the slope of the observed trend of wind velocity with galaxy circular velocity. We find that winds in simulations with CR feedback exhibit qualitatively different properties compared to SN driven winds, where most of the acceleration happens violently in situ near star forming sites. In contrast, the CR-driven winds are accelerated gently by the large-scale pressure gradient established by CRs diffusing from the star-forming galaxy disk out into the halo. The CR-driven winds also exhibit much cooler temperatures and, in the SMC-sized system, warm (T~10^4 K) gas dominates the outflow. The prevalence of warm gas in such outflows may provide a clue as to the origin of ubiquitous warm gas in the gaseous halos of galaxies detected via absorption lines in quasar spectra.
Energetic feedback from supernovae (SNe) and from active galactic nuclei (AGN) are both important processes that are thought to control how much gas is able to condense into galaxies and form stars. We show that although both AGN and SNe suppress sta
r formation, they mutually weaken one anothers effect by up to an order of magnitude in haloes in the mass range for which both feedback processes are efficient (10^11.25 M_sun < m_200 < 10^12.5 M_sun). These results demonstrate the importance of the simultaneous, non-independent inclusion of these two processes in models of galaxy formation to estimate the total feedback strength. These results are of particular relevance to semi-analytic models, which implicitly assume the effects of the two feedback processes to be independent, and also to hydrodynamical simulations that model only one of the feedback processes.
The cosmic star formation rate is observed to drop sharply after redshift z=2. We use a large, cosmological, smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation to investigate how this decline is related to the evolution of gas accretion and to outflows drive
n by active galactic nuclei (AGN). We find that the drop in the star formation rate follows a corresponding decline in the global cold-mode accretion rate density onto haloes, but with a delay of order the gas consumption time scale in the interstellar medium. Here we define cold-mode (hot-mode) accretion as gas that is accreted and whose temperature has never exceeded (did exceed) 10^5.5 K. In contrast to cold-mode accretion, which peaks at z~3, the hot mode continues to increase to z~1 and remains roughly constant thereafter. By the present time, the hot mode strongly dominates the global accretion rate onto haloes. Star formation does not track hot-mode halo accretion because most of the hot halo gas never accretes onto galaxies. AGN feedback plays a crucial role by preferentially preventing gas that entered haloes in the hot mode from accreting onto their central galaxies. Consequently, in the absence of AGN feedback, gas accreted in the hot mode would become the dominant source of fuel for star formation and the drop off in the cosmic star formation rate would be much less steep.
Observations of quasar absorption line systems reveal that the z=3 intergalactic medium (IGM) is polluted by heavy elements down to HI optical depths tau_HI<<10. What is not yet clear, however, is what fraction of the volume needs to be enriched by m
etals and whether it suffices to enrich only regions close to galaxies in order to reproduce the observations. We use gas density fields derived from large cosmological simulations, together with synthetic quasar spectra and imposed, model metal distributions to investigate what enrichment patterns can reproduce the observed median optical depth of CIV as a function of tau_HI. Our models can only satisfy the observational constraints if the z=3 IGM was primarily enriched by galaxies that reside in low-mass (m_tot<10^10 M_sun) haloes that can eject metals out to distances >10^2 kpc. Galaxies in more massive haloes cannot possibly account for the observations as they are too rare for their outflows to cover a sufficiently large fraction of the volume. Galaxies need to enrich gas out to distances that are much greater than the virial radii of their host haloes. Assuming the metals to be well mixed on small scales, our modeling requires that the fractions of the simulated volume and baryonic mass that are polluted with metals are, respectively, >10% and >50% in order to match observations.
(Abridged) We study the rate at which gas accretes onto galaxies and haloes and investigate whether the accreted gas was shocked to high temperatures before reaching a galaxy. For this purpose we use a suite of large cosmological, hydrodynamical simu
lations from the OWLS project. We improve on previous work by considering a wider range of halo masses and redshifts, by distinguishing accretion onto haloes and galaxies, by including important feedback processes, and by comparing simulations with different physics. The specific rate of gas accretion onto haloes is, like that for dark matter, only weakly dependent on halo mass. For halo masses Mhalo>>10^11 Msun it is relatively insensitive to feedback processes. In contrast, accretion rates onto galaxies are determined by radiative cooling and by outflows driven by supernovae and active galactic nuclei. Galactic winds increase the halo mass at which the central galaxies grow the fastest by about two orders of magnitude to Mhalo~10^12 Msun. Gas accretion is bimodal, with maximum past temperatures either of order the virial temperature or <~10^5 K. The fraction of gas accreted on to haloes in the hot mode is insensitive to feedback and metal-line cooling. It increases with decreasing redshift, but is mostly determined by halo mass, increasing gradually from less than 10% for ~10^11 Msun to greater than 90% at 10^13 Msun. In contrast, for accretion onto galaxies the cold mode is always significant and the relative contributions of the two accretion modes are more sensitive to feedback and metal-line cooling. The majority of stars present in any mass halo at any redshift were formed from gas accreted in the cold mode, although the hot mode contributes typically over 10% for Mhalo>~10^11 Msun. Galaxies, but not necessarily their gaseous haloes, are predominantly fed by gas that did not experience an accretion shock when it entered the host halo.
The growth of the supermassive black holes (BHs) that reside at the centres of most galaxies is intertwined with the physical processes that drive the formation of the galaxies themselves. The evolution of the relations between the mass of the BH, m_
BH, and the properties of its host therefore represent crucial aspects of the galaxy formation process. We use a cosmological simulation, as well as an analytical model, to investigate how and why the scaling relations for BHs evolve with cosmic time. We find that a simulation that reproduces the observed redshift zero relations between m_BH and the properties of its host galaxy, as well as the thermodynamic profiles of the intragroup medium, also reproduces the observed evolution in the ratio m_BH/m_s for massive galaxies, although the evolution of the m_BH/sigma relation is in apparent conflict with observations. The simulation predicts that the relations between m_BH and the binding energies of both the galaxy and its dark matter halo do not evolve, while the ratio m_BH/m_halo increases with redshift. The simple, analytic model of Booth & Schaye (2010), in which the mass of the BH is controlled by the gravitational binding energy of its host halo, quantitatively reproduces the latter two results. Finally, we can explain the evolution in the relations between m_BH and the mass and binding energy of the stellar component of its host galaxy for massive galaxies (m_s~10^11 M_sun) at low redshift (z<1) if these galaxies grow primarily through dry mergers.
The energy and momentum deposited by the radiation from accretion onto the supermassive black holes (BHs) that reside at the centres of virtually all galaxies can halt or even reverse gas inflow, providing a natural mechanism for supermassive BHs to
regulate their growth and to couple their properties to those of their host galaxies. However, it remains unclear whether this self-regulation occurs on the scale at which the BH is gravitationally dominant, on that of the stellar bulge, the galaxy, or that of the entire dark matter halo. To answer this question, we use self-consistent simulations of the co-evolution of the BH and galaxy populations that reproduce the observed correlations between the masses of the BHs and the properties of their host galaxies. We first confirm unambiguously that the BHs regulate their growth: the amount of energy that the BHs inject into their surroundings remains unchanged when the fraction of the accreted rest mass energy that is injected, is varied by four orders of magnitude. The BHs simply adjust their masses so as to inject the same amount of energy. We then use simulations with artificially reduced star formation rates to demonstrate explicitly that BH mass is not set by the stellar mass. Instead, we find that it is determined by the mass of the dark matter halo with a secondary dependence on the halo concentration, of the form that would be expected if the halo binding energy were the fundamental property that controls the mass of the BH. We predict that the logarithmic slope of the relation between dark matter halo mass and black hole mass is 1.55+/-0.05 and that the scatter around the mean relation in part reflects the scatter in the halo concentration-mass relation.
We investigate the physics driving the cosmic star formation (SF) history using the more than fifty large, cosmological, hydrodynamical simulations that together comprise the OverWhelmingly Large Simulations (OWLS) project. We systematically vary the
parameters of the model to determine which physical processes are dominant and which aspects of the model are robust. Generically, we find that SF is limited by the build-up of dark matter haloes at high redshift, reaches a broad maximum at intermediate redshift, then decreases as it is quenched by lower cooling rates in hotter and lower density gas, gas exhaustion, and self-regulated feedback from stars and black holes. The higher redshift SF is therefore mostly determined by the cosmological parameters and to a lesser extent by photo-heating from reionization. The location and height of the peak in the SF history, and the steepness of the decline towards the present, depend on the physics and implementation of stellar and black hole feedback. Mass loss from intermediate-mass stars and metal-line cooling both boost the SF rate at late times. Galaxies form stars in a self-regulated fashion at a rate controlled by the balance between, on the one hand, feedback from massive stars and black holes and, on the other hand, gas cooling and accretion. Paradoxically, the SF rate is highly insensitive to the assumed SF law. This can be understood in terms of self-regulation: if the SF efficiency is changed, then galaxies adjust their gas fractions so as to achieve the same rate of production of massive stars. Self-regulated feedback from accreting black holes is required to match the steep decline in the observed SF rate below redshift two, although more extreme feedback from SF, for example in the form of a top-heavy IMF at high gas pressures, can help.
(Abridged) We present a method that tracks the growth of supermassive black holes (BHs) and the feedback from AGN in cosmological simulations. Our model is a substantially modified version of the one by Springel et al. (2005). Because cosmological si
mulations lack both the resolution and the physics to model the multiphase interstellar medium, they tend to strongly underestimate the Bondi-Hoyle accretion rate. To allow low-mass BHs to grow, it is therefore necessary to increase the predicted Bondi-Hoyle rates in dense gas by large, ad-hoc factors. We explore the physical regimes where the use of such factors is reasonable, and through this introduce a new prescription for gas accretion. Feedback from AGN is modeled by coupling a fraction of the rest-mass energy of the accreted gas thermally into the surrounding medium. We describe the implementation as well as the limitations of the model and motivate all the changes relative to previous work. We investigate the robustness of the predictions for the cosmic star formation history, the redshift zero cosmic BH density, BH scaling relations, and galaxy specific star formation rates. We find that the freedom introduced by the need to increase the predicted accretion rates, the standard procedure in the literature, is the most significant source of uncertainty. Our simulations demonstrate that supermassive BHs are able to regulate their growth by releasing a fixed amount of energy for a given halo mass, independent of the assumed efficiency of AGN feedback, which sets the normalization of the BH scaling relations. Regardless of whether BH seeds are initially placed above or below the BH scaling relations they grow onto the same relations. AGN feedback efficiently suppresses star formation in high-mass galaxies.
Simulations of an isolated Milky Way-like galaxy, in which supernovae power a galactic fountain, reproduce the observed velocity and 21cm brightness statistics of galactic neutral hydrogen (HI). The simulated galaxy consists of a thin HI disk, simila
r in extent and brightness to that observed in the Milky Way, and extra-planar neutral gas at a range of velocities due to the galactic fountain. Mock observations of the neutral gas resemble the HI flux measurements from the Leiden-Argentine-Bonn (LAB) HI, survey, including a high-velocity tail which matches well with observations of high-velocity clouds. The simulated high-velocity clouds are typically found close to the galactic disk, with a typical line-of-sight distance of 13kpc from observers on the solar circle. The fountain efficiently cycles matter from the centre of the galaxy to its outskirts at a rate of around 0.5 M_sun/yr
