Mufasa: Galaxy star formation, gas, and metal properties across cosmic time
Abstract
We examine galaxy star formation rates (SFRs), metallicities and gas contents predicted by the Mufasa cosmological hydrodynamic simulations, which employ meshless hydrodynamics and novel feedback prescriptions that yield a good match to observed galaxy stellar mass assembly. We combine 50, 25 and 12.5 h^(−1) Mpc boxes with a quarter billion particles each to show that Mufasa broadly reproduces a wide range of relevant observations, including SFR and specific SFR functions, the mass–metallicity relation, H i and H2 fractions, H i (21 cm) and CO luminosity functions, and cosmic gas density evolution. There are mild but significant discrepancies, such as perhaps too many high-SFR galaxies, overly metal-rich and H i-poor galaxies at M^* ≳ 2 × 10^(10) M_⊙, and specific star formation rates that are too low at z ∼ 1–2. The H i mass function increases by ×2 out to z ∼ 1, then steepens to higher redshifts, while the CO luminosity function computed using the Narayanan et al. conversion factor shows a rapid increase of CO-bright galaxies out to z ∼ 2 in accord with data. Ω_(HI) and ΩH2 both scale roughly as ∝(1 + z)^(0.7) out to z ∼ 3, comparable to the rise in H i and H2 fractions. Mufasa galaxies with high SFR at a given M* have lower metallicities and higher H i and H2 fractions, following observed trends; we make quantitative predictions for how the fluctuations in the baryon cycle drive correlated scatter around galaxy scaling relations. Most of these trends are well converged with numerical resolution. These successes highlight Mufasa as a viable platform to study many facets of cosmological galaxy evolution.
Additional Information
© 2017 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2017 January 12. Received 2017 January 5; in original form 2016 October 1. The authors thank D. Anglés-Alcázar, F. Durier, K. Finlator, S. Huang, N. Katz, D. Narayanan and R. Somerville for helpful conversations and comments. RD, MR and RJT acknowledge support from the South African Research Chairs Initiative and the South African National Research Foundation. Support for MR was also provided by the Square Kilometre Array post-graduate bursary program. Support for RD was provided by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) ATP grant NNX12AH86G to the University of Arizona. Support for PFH was provided by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, NASA ATP Grant NNX14AH35G and National Science Foundation Collaborative Research Grant #1411920 and CAREER grant #1455342. The Mufasa simulations were run on the Pumbaa astrophysics computing cluster hosted at the University of the Western Cape, which was generously funded by UWC's Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor. These simulations were run with revision e77f814 of Gizmo hosted at https://bitbucket.org/rthompson/gizmo.Attached Files
Published - stx108.pdf
Submitted - 1610.01626.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 77199
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170505-063223827
- South African Research Chairs Initiative
- South African National Research Foundation
- Square Kilometre Array (SKA)
- NNX12AH86G
- NASA
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- NNX14AH35G
- NASA
- AST-1411920
- NSF
- AST-1455342
- NSF
- University of the Western Cape
- Created
-
2017-05-05Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- TAPIR, Astronomy Department