Stellar feedback and bulge formation in clumpy discs
Abstract
We use numerical simulations of isolated galaxies to study the effects of stellar feedback on the formation and evolution of giant star-forming gas 'clumps' in high-redshift, gas-rich galaxies. Such galactic discs are unstable to the formation of bound gas-rich clumps whose properties initially depend only on global disc properties, not the microphysics of feedback. In simulations without stellar feedback, clumps turn an order-unity fraction of their mass into stars and sink to the centre, forming a large bulge and kicking most of the stars out into a much more extended stellar envelope. By contrast, strong radiative stellar feedback disrupts even the most massive clumps after they turn ∼10–20 per cent of their mass into stars, in a time-scale of ∼10–100 Myr, ejecting some material into a superwind and recycling the rest of the gas into the diffuse interstellar medium (ISM). This suppresses the bulge formation rate by direct 'clump coalescence' by a factor of several. However, the galactic discs do undergo significant internal evolution in the absence of mergers: clumps form and disrupt continuously and torque gas to the galactic centre. The resulting evolution is qualitatively similar to bar/spiral evolution in simulations with a more homogeneous ISM.
Additional Information
© 2012 The Authors. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2012 RAS. Accepted 2012 August 23. Received 2012 May 23; in original form 2011 November 27. We thank our referee, Avishai Dekel, for a number of insightful comments. We also thank Stijn Wuyts, Reinhard Genzel, Sarah Newman and Sandy Faber for helpful discussions throughout the development of this manuscript. Support for PFH was provided by NASA through Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship Award Number PF1-120083 issued by the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for and on behalf of NASA under contract NAS8-03060. EQ is supported in part by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. NM is supported in part by NSERC and by the Canada Research Chairs programme. DK acknowledges support from NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HSTHF-51276.01-A. The simulations in this paper were run on the Odyssey cluster supported by the FAS Science Division Research Computing Group at Harvard University.Attached Files
Published - 427-2-968.pdf
Accepted Version - 1111.6591.pdf
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Additional details
- Alternative title
- Realistic Stellar Feedback & Bulge Formation in Clumpy Disks
- Eprint ID
- 103412
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200522-113949298
- PF1-120083
- NASA Einstein Fellowship
- NAS8-03060
- NASA
- David and Lucile Packard Foundation
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- Canada Research Chairs Program
- HST HF-51276.01-A
- NASA Hubble Fellowship
- Harvard University
- Created
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2020-05-22Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field