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Published December 2016 | Published
Journal Article Open

The impact of stellar feedback on hot gas in galaxy haloes: the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect and soft X-ray emission

Abstract

The thermal Sunyaev–Zel'dovich (SZ) effect and soft X-ray emission are routinely observed around massive galaxies and in galaxy groups and clusters. We study these observational diagnostics of galaxy haloes for a suite of cosmological 'zoom-in' simulations from the 'Feedback In Realistic Environments' project, which spans a large range in halo mass (10^(10–13) M_⊙). We explore the effect of stellar feedback on the hot gas observables. The properties of our simulated groups, such as baryon fractions, SZ flux, and X-ray luminosities (LX), are broadly consistent with existing observations, even though feedback from active galactic nuclei is not included. We make predictions for future observations of lower mass objects for both SZ and diffuse X-ray measurements, finding that they are not just scaled-down versions of massive galaxies, but more strongly affected by galactic winds driven by star formation. Low-mass haloes (≲ 10^(11) M_⊙) retain a low fraction of their baryons, which results in a strong suppression of the SZ signal. Our simulations therefore predict a scaling with halo mass that is steeper than self-similar for haloes less massive than 10^(13) M_⊙. For halo masses ≲ 10^(12) M_⊙, LX is time variable and correlated primarily with the star formation rate (SFR). For these objects, the diffuse X-ray emission is powered mostly by galactic winds and the gas dominating the X-ray emission is flowing out with radial velocities close to the halo's circular velocity. For halo masses ≳ 10^(13) M_⊙, on the other hand, LX is much less variable and not correlated with the SFR, because the emission originates from the quasi-hydrostatic, virialized halo gas.

Additional Information

© 2016 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2016 September 13. Received 2016 August 16; in original form 2016 April 5. Published: 14 September 2016. We would like to thank the referee for constructive comments, the Simons Foundation and participants of the Simons Symposium 'Galactic Superwinds: Beyond Phenomenology' for inspiration for this work, and Tim Davis for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. FvdV also thanks Rob Crain and Ian McCarthy for useful discussions. EQ was supported by NASA ATP grant 12-APT12-0183, a Simons Investigator award from the Simons Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Support for PFH was provided by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, NASA ATP Grant NNX14AH35G, and NSF Collaborative Research Grant #1411920 and CAREER grant #1455342. CAFG and ZHH were supported by NSF through grants AST-1412836 and AST-1517491, by NASA through grant NNX15AB22G, and by STScI through grants HST-AR-14293.001-A and HST-GO-14268.022-A. DK was supported by NSF grant AST-1412153. The simulations presented here used computational resources granted by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by NSF grant number OCI-1053575, specifically allocations TG-AST120025 (PI: Kereš), TG-AST130039 (PI: Hopkins), TG-AST1140023 (PI: Faucher-Giguère) as well as the Caltech computer cluster 'Zwicky' (NSF MRI award #PHY-0960291) and the Northwestern computer cluster Quest. Some simulations were run with resources provided by the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center, proposal SMD-14-5492.

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August 19, 2023
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