7,153 research outputs found
Globular Cluster Formation in the Virgo Cluster
Metal poor globular clusters (MPGCs) are a unique probe of the early
universe, in particular the reionization era. Systems of globular clusters in
galaxy clusters are particularly interesting as it is in the progenitors of
galaxy clusters that the earliest reionizing sources first formed. Although the
exact physical origin of globular clusters is still debated, it is generally
admitted that globular clusters form in early, rare dark matter peaks (Moore et
al. 2006; Boley et al. 2009). We provide a fully numerical analysis of the
Virgo cluster globular cluster system by identifying the present day globular
cluster system with exactly such early, rare dark matter peaks. A popular
hypothesis is that that the observed truncation of blue metal poor globular
cluster formation is due to reionization (Spitler et al. 2012; Boley et al.
2009; Brodie & Strader 2006); adopting this view, constraining the formation
epoch of MPGCs provides a complementary constraint on the epoch of
reionization. By analyzing both the line of sight velocity dispersion and the
surface density distribution of the present day distribution we are able to
constrain the redshift and mass of the dark matter peaks. We find and quantify
a dependence on the chosen line of sight of these quantities, whose strength
varies with redshift, and coupled with star formation efficiency arguments find
a best fitting formation mass and redshift of and . We predict intracluster MPGCs in
the Virgo cluster. Our results confirm the techniques pioneered by Moore et al.
(2006) when applied to the the Virgo cluster and extend and refine the analytic
results of Spitler et al. (2012) numerically.Comment: 13 Pages, 13 Figures, submitted to MNRA
Galactic star formation in parsec-scale resolution simulations
The interstellar medium (ISM) in galaxies is multiphase and cloudy, with
stars forming in the very dense, cold gas found in Giant Molecular Clouds
(GMCs). Simulating the evolution of an entire galaxy, however, is a
computational problem which covers many orders of magnitude, so many
simulations cannot reach densities high enough or temperatures low enough to
resolve this multiphase nature. Therefore, the formation of GMCs is not
captured and the resulting gas distribution is smooth, contrary to
observations. We investigate how star formation (SF) proceeds in simulated
galaxies when we obtain parsec-scale resolution and more successfully capture
the multiphase ISM. Both major mergers and the accretion of cold gas via
filaments are dominant contributors to a galaxy's total stellar budget and we
examine SF at high resolution in both of these contexts.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. To appear in the proceedings for IAU Symposium
270: Computational Star Formation (eds. Alves, Elmegreen, Girart, Trimble
On the filamentary environment of galaxies
The correlation between the large-scale distribution of galaxies and their
spectroscopic properties at z=1.5 is investigated using the Horizon MareNostrum
cosmological run.
We have extracted a large sample of 10^5 galaxies from this large
hydrodynamical simulation featuring standard galaxy formation physics. Spectral
synthesis is applied to these single stellar populations to generate spectra
and colours for all galaxies. We use the skeleton as a tracer of the cosmic web
and study how our galaxy catalogue depends on the distance to the skeleton. We
show that galaxies closer to the skeleton tend to be redder, but that the
effect is mostly due to the proximity of large haloes at the nodes of the
skeleton, rather than the filaments themselves.
This effects translate into a bimodality in the colour distribution of our
sample. The origin of this bimodality is investigated and seems to follow from
the ram pressure stripping of satellite galaxies within the more massive
clusters of the simulation.
The virtual catalogues (spectroscopical properties of the MareNostrum
galaxies at various redshifts) are available online at
http://www.iap.fr/users/pichon/MareNostrum/cataloguesComment: 18 pages, 27 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
Modelling CO emission from hydrodynamic simulations of nearby spirals, starbursting mergers, and high-redshift galaxies
We model the intensity of emission lines from the CO molecule, based on
hydrodynamic simulations of spirals, mergers, and high-redshift galaxies with
very high resolutions (3pc and 10^3 Msun) and detailed models for the
phase-space structure of the interstellar gas including shock heating, stellar
feedback processes and galactic winds. The simulations are analyzed with a
Large Velocity Gradient (LVG) model to compute the local emission in various
molecular lines in each resolution element, radiation transfer and opacity
effects, and the intensity emerging from galaxies, to generate synthetic
spectra for various transitions of the CO molecule. This model reproduces the
known properties of CO spectra and CO-to-H2 conversion factors in nearby
spirals and starbursting major mergers. The high excitation of CO lines in
mergers is dominated by an excess of high-density gas, and the high turbulent
velocities and compression that create this dense gas excess result in broad
linewidths and low CO intensity-to-H2 mass ratios. When applied to
high-redshift gas-rich disks galaxies, the same model predicts that their
CO-to-H2 conversion factor is almost as high as in nearby spirals, and much
higher than in starbursting mergers. High-redshift disk galaxies contain giant
star-forming clumps that host a high-excitation component associated to gas
warmed by the spatially-concentrated stellar feedback sources, although CO(1-0)
to CO(3-2) emission is overall dominated by low-excitation gas around the
densest clumps. These results overall highlight a strong dependence of CO
excitation and the CO-to-H2 conversion factor on galaxy type, even at similar
star formation rates or densities. The underlying processes are driven by the
interstellar medium structure and turbulence and its response to stellar
feedback, which depend on global galaxy structure and in turn impact the CO
emission properties.Comment: A&A in pres
Initial Conditions for Large Cosmological Simulations
This technical paper describes a software package that was designed to
produce initial conditions for large cosmological simulations in the context of
the Horizon collaboration. These tools generalize E. Bertschinger's Grafic1
software to distributed parallel architectures and offer a flexible alternative
to the Grafic2 software for ``zoom'' initial conditions, at the price of large
cumulated cpu and memory usage. The codes have been validated up to resolutions
of 4096^3 and were used to generate the initial conditions of large
hydrodynamical and dark matter simulations. They also provide means to generate
constrained realisations for the purpose of generating initial conditions
compatible with, e.g. the local group, or the SDSS catalog.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, submitted to ApJ
Collapse, outflows and fragmentation of massive, turbulent and magnetized prestellar barotropic cores
Stars and more particularly massive stars, have a drastic impact on galaxy
evolution. Yet the conditions in which they form and collapse are still not
fully understood. In particular, the influence of the magnetic field on the
collapse of massive clumps is relatively unexplored, it is thus of great
relevance in the context of the formation of massive stars to investigate its
impact. We perform high resolution, MHD simulations of the collapse of hundred
solar masses, turbulent and magnetized clouds, using the adaptive mesh
refinement code RAMSES. We compute various quantities such as mass
distribution, magnetic field and angular momentum within the collapsing core
and study the episodic outflows and the fragmentation that occurs during the
collapse. The magnetic field has a drastic impact on the cloud evolution. We
find that magnetic braking is able to substantially reduce the angular momentum
in the inner part of the collapsing cloud. Fast and episodic outflows are being
launched with typical velocities of the order of 3-5 km s although the
highest velocities can be as high as 30-40 km s. The fragmentation in
several objects, is reduced in substantially magnetized clouds with respect to
hydrodynamical ones by a factor of the order of 1.5-2. We conclude that
magnetic fields have a significant impact on the evolution of massive clumps.
In combination with radiation, magnetic fields largely determine the outcome of
massive core collapse. We stress that numerical convergence of MHD collapse is
a challenging issue. In particular, numerical diffusion appears to be important
at high density therefore possibly leading to an over-estimation of the number
of fragments.Comment: accepted for publication in A&
Evolution of the mass, size, and star formation rate in high-redshift merging galaxies MIRAGE - A new sample of simulations with detailed stellar feedback
We aim at addressing the questions related to galaxy mass assembly through
major and minor wet merging processes in the redshift range 1<z<2. A consequent
fraction of Milky Way like galaxies are thought to have undergone an unstable
clumpy phase at this early stage. Using the adaptive mesh refinement code
RAMSES, with a recent physically-motivated implementation of stellar feedback,
we build the Merging and Isolated high-Redshift Adaptive mesh refinement
Galaxies (MIRAGE) sample. It is composed of 20 mergers and 3 isolated idealized
disks simulations with global physical properties in accordance with the 1<z<2
mass complete sample MASSIV. The numerical hydrodynamical resolution reaches 7
parsecs in the smallest Eulerian cells. Our simulations include: star
formation, metal line cooling, metallicity advection, and a recent
implementation of stellar feedback which encompasses OB-type stars radiative
pressure, photo-ionization heating, and supernovae. The initial conditions are
set to match the z~2 observations, thanks to a new public code DICE. The
numerical resolution allows us to follow the formation and evolution of giant
clumps formed in-situ from Jeans instabilities triggered by high initial gas
fraction. The star formation history of isolated disks shows stochastic star
formation rate, which proceeds from the complex behavior of the giant clumps.
Our minor and major gas-rich merger simulations do not trigger starbursts,
suggesting a saturation of the star formation in a turbulent and clumpy
interstellar medium fed by substantial accretion from the circum-galactic
medium. Our simulations are close to the normal regime of the disk-like star
formation on a Schmidt-Kennicutt diagram. The mass-size relation and its rate
of evolution matches observations, suggesting that the inside-out growth
mechanisms of the stellar disk do not necessarily require to be achieved
through a cold accretion.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures. Accepted in A&
Chameleon f(R) gravity on the Virgo cluster scale
Models of modified gravity offer promising alternatives to the concordance Î cold dark matter (ÎCDM) cosmology to explain the late-time acceleration of the universe. A popular such model is f(R) gravity, in which the Ricci scalar in the Einstein-Hilbert action is replaced by a general function of it. We study the f(R) model of Hu & Sawicki, which recovers standard general relativity in high-density regimes, while reproducing the desired late time acceleration at cosmological scales. We run a suite of high-resolution zoom simulations using the ecosmog code to examine the effect of f(R) gravity on the properties of a halo that is analogous to the Virgo cluster. We show that the velocity dispersion profiles can potentially discriminate between f(R) models and ÎCDM, and provide complementary analysis of lensing signal profiles to explore the possibility to further distinguish the different f(R) models. Our results confirm the techniques explored by CabrĂ© etal. to quantify the effect of environment in the behaviour of f(R) gravity, and we extend them to study halo satellites at various redshifts. We find that the modified gravity effects in our models are most observable at low redshifts, and that effects are generally stronger for satellites far from the centre of the main halo. We show that the screening properties of halo satellites trace very well that of dark matter particles, which means that low-resolution simulations in which subhaloes are not very well resolved can in principle be used to study satellite properties. We discuss observables, particularly for halo satellites, that can potentially be used to constrain the observational viability of f(R) gravit
The large-scale orientations of disc galaxies
We use a 380-hâ1 pc resolution hydrodynamic adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) simulation of a cosmic filament to investigate the orientations of a sample of âŒ100 well-resolved galactic discs spanning two orders of magnitude in both stellar and halo mass. We find: (i) at z= 0, there is an almost perfect alignment at a median angle of 18°, in the inner dark matter halo regions where the discs reside, between the spin vector of the gaseous and stellar galactic discs and that of their inner host haloes. The alignment between galaxy spin and spin of the entire host halo is however significantly weaker, ranging from a median of ⌠46° at z= 1 to ⌠50° at z= 0. (ii) The most massive galaxy discs have spins preferentially aligned so as to point along their host filaments. (iii) The spin of discs in lower mass haloes shows, at redshifts above z⌠0.5 and in regions of low environmental density, a clear signature of alignment with the intermediate principal axis of the large-scale tidal field. This behaviour is consistent with predictions of linear tidal torque theory. This alignment decreases with increasing environmental density, and vanishes in the highest density regions. Non-linear effects in the high-density environments are plausibly responsible for establishing this density-alignment correlation. We expect that our numerical results provide important insights for both understanding intrinsic alignment in weak lensing from the astrophysical perspective and formation and evolution processes of galactic discs in a cosmological contex
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