Stellar haloes in Milky-Way mass galaxies: From the inner to the outer haloes

We present a comprehensive study of the chemical properties of the stellar haloes of Milky-Way mass galaxies, analysing the transition between the inner to the outer haloes. We find the transition radius between the relative dominance of the inner-halo and outer-halo stellar populations to be ~15-20 kpc for most of our haloes, similar to that inferred for the Milky Way from recent observations. While the number density of stars in the simulated inner-halo populations decreases rapidly with distance, the outer-halo populations contribute about 20-40 per cent in the fiducial solar neighborhood, in particular at the lowest metallicities. We have determined [Fe/H] profiles for our simulated haloes; they exhibit flat or mild gradients, in the range [-0.002, -0.01 ] dex/kpc. The metallicity distribution functions exhibit different features, reflecting the different assembly history of the individual stellar haloes. We find that stellar haloes formed with larger contributions from massive subgalactic systems have steeper metallicity gradients. Very metal-poor stars are mainly contributed to the halo systems by lower-mass satellites. There is a clear trend among the predicted metallicity distribution functions that a higher fraction of low-metallicity stars are found with increasing radius. These properties are consistent with the range of behaviours observed for stellar haloes of nearby galaxies.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. Accepted MNRAS. Revised version after referee's comment

Fingerprints of the Hierarchical Building up of the Structure on the Mass-Metallicity Relation

We study the mass-metallicity relation of galactic systems with stellar masses larger than 10^9 Mo in Lambda-CDM scenarios by using chemical hydrodynamical simulations. We find that this relation arises naturally as a consequence of the formation of the structure in a hierarchical scenario. The hierarchical building up of the structure determines a characteristic stellar mass at M_c ~10^10.2 Moh^-1 which exhibits approximately solar metallicities from z ~ 3 to z=0. This characteristic mass separates galactic systems in two groups with massive ones forming most of their stars and metals at high redshift. We find evolution in the zero point and slope of the mass-metallicity relation driven mainly by the low mass systems which exhibit the larger variations in the chemical properties. Although stellar mass and circular velocity are directly related, the correlation between circular velocity and metallicity shows a larger evolution with redshift making this relation more appropriate to confront models and observations. The dispersion found in both relations is a function of the stellar mass and reflects the different dynamical history of evolution of the systems.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. Accepted MNRAS Letter

The Spatial Distribution of the Galactic First Stars II: SPH Approach

We use cosmological, chemo-dynamical, smoothed particle hydrodynamical simulations of Milky-Way-analogue galaxies to find the expected present-day distributions of both metal-free stars that formed from primordial gas and the oldest star populations. We find that metal-free stars continue to form until z~4 in halos that are chemically isolated and located far away from the biggest progenitor of the final system. As a result, if the Population III initial mass function allows stars with low enough mass to survive until z=0 (< 0.8 Msol), they would be distributed throughout the Galactic halo. On the other hand, the oldest stars form in halos that collapsed close to the highest density peak of the final system, and at z=0 they are located preferentially in the central region of the Galaxy, i.e., in the bulge. According to our models, these trends are not sensitive to the merger histories of the disk galaxies or the implementation of supernova feedback. Furthermore, these full hydrodynamics results are consistent with our N-body results in Paper I, and lend further weight to the conclusion that surveys of low-metallicity stars in the Galactic halo can be used to directly constrain the properties of primordial stars. In particular, they suggest that the current lack of detections of metal-free stars implies that their lifetimes were shorter than a Hubble time, placing constraints on the metal-free initial mass function.Comment: Accepted by ApJ. Emulate ApJ styl

Early Enrichment of the Intergalactic Medium and its Feedback on Galaxy Formation

Supernova-driven outflows from early galaxies may have had a large impact on the kinetic and chemical structure of the intergalactic medium (IGM). We use three-dimensional Monte Carlo cosmological realizations of a simple linear peaks model to track the time evolution of such metal-enriched outflows and their feedback on galaxy formation. We find that at most 30% of the IGM by volume is enriched to values above 10^-3 solar in models that only include objects that cool by atomic transitions. The majority of enrichment occurs relatively early (5 < z < 12) and resulting in a mass-averaged cosmological metallicity between 10^-3 and 10^-1.5 solar. The inclusion of Population III objects that cool through H2 line emission has only a minor impact on these results: increasing the mean metallicity and filling factor by at most a factor of 1.4, and moving the dawn of the enrichment epoch to a redshift of approximately 14 at the earliest. Thus enrichment by outflowing galaxies is likely to have been incomplete and inhomogeneous, biased to the areas near the starbursting galaxies themselves. Models with a 10% star formation efficiency can satisfactorily reproduce the nearly constant (2 < z < 5, Z approximately 3.5 x 10^-4 solar) metallicity of the low column density Ly-alpha forest derived by Songaila (2001), an effect of the decreasing efficiency of metal loss from larger galaxies. Finally, we show that IGM enrichment is intimately tied to the ram-pressure stripping of baryons from neighboring perturbations. This results in the suppression of at least 20% of the dwarf galaxies in the mass range 10^8.5 to 10^9.5 solar, in all models with filling factors greater than 2%, and an overall suppression of approximately 50% of dwarf galaxies in the most observationally-favored model.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted to Ap

The role of tidal interactions in driving galaxy evolution

We carry out a statistical analysis of galaxy pairs selected from chemical hydrodynamical simulations with the aim at assessing the capability of hierarchical scenarios to reproduce recent observational results for galaxies in pairs. Particularly, we analyse the effects of mergers and interactions on the star formation (SF) activity, the global mean chemical properties and the colour distribution of interacting galaxies. We also assess the effects of spurious pairs.Comment: to appear in "Groups of galaxies in the nearby Universe" ESO Workshop, (Dec 2005) Santiago, Chil