scholarly journals Simulating the effect of photoheating feedback during reionization

2019 ◽  
Vol 488 (1) ◽  
pp. 419-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaohan Wu ◽  
Rahul Kannan ◽  
Federico Marinacci ◽  
Mark Vogelsberger ◽  
Lars Hernquist

Abstract We present self-consistent radiation hydrodynamic simulations of hydrogen reionization performed with arepo-rt complemented by a state-of-the-art galaxy formation model. We examine how photoheating feedback, due to reionization, shapes the galaxies properties. Our fiducial model completes reionization by z ≈ 6 and matches observations of the Ly α forest, the cosmic microwave background electron scattering optical depth, the high-redshift ultraviolet (UV) luminosity function, and stellar mass function. Contrary to previous works, photoheating suppresses star formation rates by more than $50{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ only in haloes less massive than ∼108.4 M⊙ (∼108.8 M⊙) at z = 6 (z = 5), suggesting inefficient photoheating feedback from photons within galaxies. The use of a uniform UV background that heats up the gas at z ≈ 10.7 generates an earlier onset of suppression of star formation compared to our fiducial model. This discrepancy can be mitigated by adopting a UV background model with a more realistic reionization history. In the absence of stellar feedback, photoheating alone is only able to quench haloes less massive than ∼109 M⊙ at z ≳ 5, implying that photoheating feedback is sub-dominant in regulating star formation. In addition, stellar feedback, implemented as a non-local galactic wind scheme in the simulations, weakens the strength of photoheating feedback by reducing the amount of stellar sources. Most importantly, photoheating does not leave observable imprints in the UV luminosity function, stellar mass function, or the cosmic star formation rate density. The feasibility of using these observables to detect imprints of reionization therefore requires further investigation.

2019 ◽  
Vol 489 (1) ◽  
pp. 487-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boyan K Stoychev ◽  
Keri L Dixon ◽  
Andrea V Macciò ◽  
Marvin Blank ◽  
Aaron A Dutton

ABSTRACT We use 38 high-resolution simulations of galaxy formation between redshift 10 and 5 to study the impact of a 3 keV warm dark matter (WDM) candidate on the high-redshift Universe. We focus our attention on the stellar mass function and the global star formation rate and consider the consequences for reionization, namely the neutral hydrogen fraction evolution and the electron scattering optical depth. We find that three different effects contribute to differentiate warm and cold dark matter (CDM) predictions: WDM suppresses the number of haloes with mass less than few 109 M⊙; at a fixed halo mass, WDM produces fewer stars than CDM, and finally at halo masses below 109 M⊙, WDM has a larger fraction of dark haloes than CDM post-reionization. These three effects combine to produce a lower stellar mass function in WDM for galaxies with stellar masses at and below 107 M⊙. For z > 7, the global star formation density is lower by a factor of two in the WDM scenario, and for a fixed escape fraction, the fraction of neutral hydrogen is higher by 0.3 at z ∼ 6. This latter quantity can be partially reconciled with CDM and observations only by increasing the escape fraction from 23 per cent to 34 per cent. Overall, our study shows that galaxy formation simulations at high redshift are a key tool to differentiate between dark matter candidates given a model for baryonic physics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 499 (2) ◽  
pp. 2401-2415
Author(s):  
A C Trapp ◽  
Steven R Furlanetto

ABSTRACT Cosmic variance is the intrinsic scatter in the number density of galaxies due to fluctuations in the large-scale dark matter density field. In this work, we present a simple analytic model of cosmic variance in the high-redshift Universe (z ∼ 5–15). We assume that galaxies grow according to the evolution of the halo mass function, which we allow to vary with large-scale environment. Our model produces a reasonable match to the observed ultraviolet (UV) luminosity functions in this era by regulating star formation through stellar feedback and assuming that the UV luminosity function is dominated by recent star formation. We find that cosmic variance in the UV luminosity function is dominated by the variance in the underlying dark matter halo population, and not by differences in halo accretion or the specifics of our stellar feedback model. We also find that cosmic variance dominates over Poisson noise for future high-z surveys except for the brightest sources or at very high redshifts (z ≳ 12). We provide a linear approximation of cosmic variance for a variety of redshifts, magnitudes, and survey areas through the public python package galcv. Finally, we introduce a new method for incorporating priors on cosmic variance into estimates of the galaxy luminosity function and demonstrate that it significantly improves constraints on that important observable.


2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (S292) ◽  
pp. 245-245
Author(s):  
Jian Fu ◽  
Guinevere Kauffmann

AbstractWe study the redshift evolution of neutral and molecular gas in the interstellar medium with the results from semi-analytic models of galaxy formation and evolution, which track the cold gas related physical processes in radially resolved galaxy disks. Two kinds of prescriptions are adopted to describe the conversion between molecular and neutral gas in the ISM: one is related to the gas surface density and gas metallicity based on the model results by Krumholz, Mckee & Tumlinson; the other is related the pressure of ISM. We try four types of star formation laws in the models to study the effect of the molecular gas component and the star formation time scale on the model results, and find that the H2 dependent star formation rate with constant star formation efficiency is the preferred star formation law. We run the models based on both Millennium and Millennium II Simulation haloes, and the model parameters are adjusted to fit the observations at z = 0 from THINGS/HERACLES and ALFALFA/COLD GASS. We give predictions for the redshift evolution of cosmic star formation density, H2 to HI cosmic ratios, gas to star mass ratios and gas metallicity vs stellar mass relation. Based on the model results, we find that: (i) the difference in the H2 to HI ratio at z > 3 between the two H2 fraction prescriptions can help future observations to test which prescription is better; (ii) a constant redshift independent star formation time scale will postpone the star formation processes at high redshift and cause obvious redshift evolution for the relation between gas metallicity and stellar mass in galaxies at z < 3.


Author(s):  
Mahavir Sharma ◽  
Tom Theuns

Abstract We present the Iκεα model of galaxy formation, in which a galaxy’s star formation rate is set by the balance between energy injected by feedback from massive stars and energy lost by the deepening of the potential of its host dark matter halo due to cosmological accretion. Such a balance is secularly stable provided that the star formation rate increases with the pressure in the star forming gas. The Iκεα model has four parameters that together control the feedback from star formation and the cosmological accretion rate onto a halo. Iκεα reproduces accurately the star formation rate as a function of halo mass and redshift in the eagle hydrodynamical simulation, even when all four parameters are held constant. It predicts the emergence of a star forming main sequence along which the specific star formation rate depends weakly on stellar mass with an amplitude that increases rapidly with redshift. We briefly discuss the emerging mass-metallicity relation, the evolution of the galaxy stellar mass function, and an extension of the model that includes feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN). These self-regulation results are independent of the star formation law and the galaxy’s gas content. Instead, star forming galaxies are shaped by the balance between stellar feedback and cosmological accretion, with accurately accounting for energy losses associated with feedback a crucial ingredient.


2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (S245) ◽  
pp. 471-476
Author(s):  
Aprajita Verma ◽  
Matthew Lehnert ◽  
Natascha Förster Schreiber ◽  
Malcolm Bremer ◽  
Laura Douglas

AbstractHigh redshift galaxies play a key role in our developing understanding of galaxy formation and evolution. Since such galaxies are being studied within a Gyr of the big bang, they provide a unique probe of the physics of one of the first generations of large-scale star-formation. We have performed a complete statistical study of the physical properties of a robust sample of z~5 UV luminous galaxies selected using the Lyman-break technique. The characteristic properties of this sample differ from LBGs at z~3 of comparable luminosity in that they are a factor of ten less massive (~few×109 M⊙) and the majority (~70%) are considerably younger (<100Myr). Our results support no more than a modest decline in the global star formation rate density at high redshifts and suggest that ~1% of the stellar mass density of the universe had already assembled at z~5. The constraint derived for the latter is affected by their young ages and short duty cycles which imply existing z~5 LBG samples may be highly incomplete. These intense starbursts have high unobscured star formation rate surface densities (~100s M⊙ yr−1 kpc−2), suggesting they drive outflows and winds that enrich the intra- and inter-galactic media with metals. These properties imply that the majority of z~5 LBGs are in formation meaning that most of their star-formation has likely occurred during the last few crossing times. They are experiencing their first (few) generations of large-scale star formation and are accumulating their first significant stellar mass. As such, z~5 LBGs are the likely progenitors of the spheroidal components of present-day massive galaxies (supported by their high stellar mass surface densities and their core phase-space densities).


2020 ◽  
Vol 500 (3) ◽  
pp. 3394-3412
Author(s):  
Steven R Furlanetto

ABSTRACT In recent years, simple models of galaxy formation have been shown to provide reasonably good matches to available data on high-redshift luminosity functions. However, these prescriptions are primarily phenomenological, with only crude connections to the physics of galaxy evolution. Here, we introduce a set of galaxy models that are based on a simple physical framework but incorporate more sophisticated models of feedback, star formation, and other processes. We apply these models to the high-redshift regime, showing that most of the generic predictions of the simplest models remain valid. In particular, the stellar mass–halo mass relation depends almost entirely on the physics of feedback (and is thus independent of the details of small-scale star formation) and the specific star formation rate is a simple multiple of the cosmological accretion rate. We also show that, in contrast, the galaxy’s gas mass is sensitive to the physics of star formation, although the inclusion of feedback-driven star formation laws significantly changes the naive expectations. While these models are far from detailed enough to describe every aspect of galaxy formation, they inform our understanding of galaxy formation by illustrating several generic aspects of that process, and they provide a physically grounded basis for extrapolating predictions to faint galaxies and high redshifts currently out of reach of observations. If observations show violations from these simple trends, they would indicate new physics occurring inside the earliest generations of galaxies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 500 (2) ◽  
pp. 2127-2145
Author(s):  
Christopher C Lovell ◽  
Aswin P Vijayan ◽  
Peter A Thomas ◽  
Stephen M Wilkins ◽  
David J Barnes ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT We introduce the First Light And Reionisation Epoch Simulations (FLARES), a suite of zoom simulations using the EAGLE model. We resimulate a range of overdensities during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) in order to build composite distribution functions, as well as explore the environmental dependence of galaxy formation and evolution during this critical period of galaxy assembly. The regions are selected from a large $(3.2 \, \mathrm{cGpc})^{3}$ parent volume, based on their overdensity within a sphere of radius 14 h−1 cMpc. We then resimulate with full hydrodynamics, and employ a novel weighting scheme that allows the construction of composite distribution functions that are representative of the full parent volume. This significantly extends the dynamic range compared to smaller volume periodic simulations. We present an analysis of the galaxy stellar mass function (GSMF), the star formation rate distribution function (SFRF), and the star-forming sequence (SFS) predicted by FLARES, and compare to a number of observational and model constraints. We also analyse the environmental dependence over an unprecedented range of overdensity. Both the GSMF and the SFRF exhibit a clear double-Schechter form, up to the highest redshifts (z = 10). We also find no environmental dependence of the SFS normalization. The increased dynamic range probed by FLARES will allow us to make predictions for a number of large area surveys that will probe the EoR in coming years, carried out on new observatories such as Roman and Euclid.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (S356) ◽  
pp. 295-298
Author(s):  
Betelehem Bilata-Woldeyes ◽  
Mirjana Pović ◽  
Zeleke Beyoro-Amado ◽  
Tilahun Getachew-Woreta ◽  
Shimeles Terefe

AbstractStudying the morphology of a large sample of active galaxies at different wavelengths and comparing it with active galactic nuclei (AGN) properties, such as black hole mass (MBH) and Eddington ratio (λEdd), can help us in understanding better the connection between AGN and their host galaxies and the role of nuclear activity in galaxy formation and evolution. By using the BAT-SWIFT hard X-ray public data and by extracting those parameters measured for AGN and by using other public catalogues for parameters such as stellar mass (M*), star formation rate (SFR), bolometric luminosity (Lbol), etc., we studied the multiwavelength morphological properties of host galaxies of ultra-hard X-ray detected AGN and their correlation with other AGN properties. We found that ultra hard X-ray detected AGN can be hosted by all morphological types, but in larger fractions (42%) they seem to be hosted by spirals in optical, to be quiet in radio, and to have compact morphologies in X-rays. When comparing morphologies with other galaxy properties, we found that ultra hard X-ray detected AGN follow previously obtained relations. On the SFR vs. stellar mass diagram, we found that although the majority of sources are located below the main sequence (MS) of star formation (SF), still non-negligible number of sources, with diverse morphologies, is located on and/or above the MS, suggesting that AGN feedback might have more complex influence on the SF in galaxies than simply quenching it, as it was suggested in some of previous studies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 503 (4) ◽  
pp. 5115-5133
Author(s):  
A A Khostovan ◽  
S Malhotra ◽  
J E Rhoads ◽  
S Harish ◽  
C Jiang ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT The H α equivalent width (EW) is an observational proxy for specific star formation rate (sSFR) and a tracer of episodic, bursty star-formation activity. Previous assessments show that the H α EW strongly anticorrelates with stellar mass as M−0.25 similar to the sSFR – stellar mass relation. However, such a correlation could be driven or even formed by selection effects. In this study, we investigate how H α EW distributions correlate with physical properties of galaxies and how selection biases could alter such correlations using a z = 0.47 narrow-band-selected sample of 1572 H α emitters from the Ly α Galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization (LAGER) survey as our observational case study. The sample covers a 3 deg2 area of COSMOS with a survey comoving volume of 1.1 × 105 Mpc3. We assume an intrinsic EW distribution to form mock samples of H α emitters and propagate the selection criteria to match observations, giving us control on how selection biases can affect the underlying results. We find that H α EW intrinsically correlates with stellar mass as W0∝M−0.16 ± 0.03 and decreases by a factor of ∼3 from 107 M⊙ to 1010 M⊙, while not correcting for selection effects steepens the correlation as M−0.25 ± 0.04. We find low-mass H α emitters to be ∼320 times more likely to have rest-frame EW&gt;200 Å compared to high-mass H α emitters. Combining the intrinsic W0–stellar mass correlation with an observed stellar mass function correctly reproduces the observed H α luminosity function, while not correcting for selection effects underestimates the number of bright emitters. This suggests that the W0–stellar mass correlation when corrected for selection effects is physically significant and reproduces three statistical distributions of galaxy populations (line luminosity function, stellar mass function, EW distribution). At lower stellar masses, we find there are more high-EW outliers compared to high stellar masses, even after we take into account selection effects. Our results suggest that high sSFR outliers indicative of bursty star formation activity are intrinsically more prevalent in low-mass H α emitters and not a byproduct of selection effects.


2019 ◽  
Vol 488 (2) ◽  
pp. 2202-2221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Jaacks ◽  
Steven L Finkelstein ◽  
Volker Bromm

ABSTRACT We utilize gizmo, coupled with newly developed sub-grid models for Population III (Pop III) and Population II (Pop II), to study the legacy of star formation in the pre-reionization Universe. We find that the Pop II star formation rate density (SFRD), produced in our simulation (${\sim } 10^{-2}\ \mathrm{M}_\odot \, {\rm yr^{-1}\, Mpc^{-3}}$ at z ≃ 10), matches the total SFRD inferred from observations within a factor of &lt;2 at 7 ≲ z ≲ 10. The Pop III SFRD, however, reaches a plateau at ${\sim }10^{-3}\ \mathrm{M}_\odot \, {\rm yr^{-1}\, Mpc^{-3}}$ by z ≈ 10, remaining largely unaffected by the presence of Pop II feedback. At z  = 7.5, ${\sim } 20{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ of Pop III star formation occurs in isolated haloes that have never experienced any Pop II star formation (i.e. primordial haloes). We predict that Pop III-only galaxies exist at magnitudes MUV ≳ −11, beyond the limits for direct detection with the James Webb Space Telescope. We assess that our stellar mass function (SMF) and UV luminosity function (UVLF) agree well with the observed low mass/faint-end behaviour at z = 8 and 10. However, beyond the current limiting magnitudes, we find that both our SMF and UVLF demonstrate a deviation/turnover from the expected power-law slope (MUV,turn = −13.4 ± 1.1 at z  = 10). This could impact observational estimates of the true SFRD by a factor of 2(10) when integrating to MUV = −12 (−8) at z ∼ 10, depending on integration limits. Our turnover correlates well with the transition from dark matter haloes dominated by molecular cooling to those dominated by atomic cooling, for a mass Mhalo ≈ 108 M⊙ at z ≃ 10.


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