The origin of ultra diffuse galaxies: stellar feedback and quenching

We test if the cosmological zoom-in simulations of isolated galaxies from the FIRE project reproduce the properties of ultra diffuse galaxies. We show that stellar feedback-generated outflows that dynamically heat galactic stars, together with a passively aging stellar population after imposed quenching (from e.g. infall into a galaxy cluster), naturally reproduce the observed population of red UDGs, without the need for high spin halos or dynamical influence from their host cluster. We reproduce the range of surface brightness, radius and absolute magnitude of the observed z=0 red UDGs by quenching simulated galaxies at a range of different times. They represent a mostly uniform population of dark matter-dominated galaxies with M_star ~1e8 Msun, low metallicity and a broad range of ages. The most massive simulated UDGs require earliest quenching and are therefore the oldest. Our simulations provide a good match to the central enclosed masses and the velocity dispersions of the observed UDGs (20-50 km/s). The enclosed masses of the simulated UDGs remain largely fixed across a broad range of quenching times because the central regions of their dark matter halos complete their growth early. A typical UDG forms in a dwarf halo mass range of Mh~4e10-1e11 Msun. The most massive red UDG in our sample requires quenching at z~3 when its halo reached Mh ~ 1e11 Msun. If it, instead, continues growing in the field, by z=0 its halo mass reaches > 5e11 Msun, comparable to the halo of an L* galaxy. If our simulated dwarfs are not quenched, they evolve into bluer low-surface brightness galaxies with mass-to-light ratios similar to observed field dwarfs. While our simulation sample covers a limited range of formation histories and halo masses, we predict that UDG is a common, and perhaps even dominant, galaxy type around Ms~1e8 Msun, both in the field and in clusters.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figures; match the MNRAS accepted versio

The impact of baryonic physics on the structure of dark matter haloes: the view from the FIRE cosmological simulations

We study the distribution of cold dark matter (CDM) in cosmological simulations from the FIRE (Feedback In Realistic Environments) project, for M_* ∼ 10^(4–11) M_⊙ galaxies in M_h ∼ 10^(9–12) M_⊙ haloes. FIRE incorporates explicit stellar feedback in the multiphase interstellar medium, with energetics from stellar population models. We find that stellar feedback, without ‘fine-tuned’ parameters, greatly alleviates small-scale problems in CDM. Feedback causes bursts of star formation and outflows, altering the DM distribution. As a result, the inner slope of the DM halo profile (α) shows a strong mass dependence: profiles are shallow at M_h ∼ 10^(10)–10^(11) M_⊙ and steepen at higher/lower masses. The resulting core sizes and slopes are consistent with observations. This is broadly consistent with previous work using simpler feedback schemes, but we find steeper mass dependence of α, and relatively late growth of cores. Because the star formation efficiency M_*/M_h is strongly halo mass dependent, a rapid change in α occurs around M_h ∼ 10^(10) M_⊙ (M_* ∼ 10^6–10^7 M_⊙), as sufficient feedback energy becomes available to perturb the DM. Large cores are not established during the period of rapid growth of haloes because of ongoing DM mass accumulation. Instead, cores require several bursts of star formation after the rapid build-up has completed. Stellar feedback dramatically reduces circular velocities in the inner kpc of massive dwarfs; this could be sufficient to explain the ‘Too Big To Fail’ problem without invoking non-standard DM. Finally, feedback and baryonic contraction in Milky Way-mass haloes produce DM profiles slightly shallower than the Navarro–Frenk–White profile, consistent with the normalization of the observed Tully–Fisher relation

Predictions for CO emission and the CO-to-H2 conversion factor in galaxy simulations with non-equilibrium chemistry

Our ability to trace the star-forming molecular gas is important to our understanding of the Universe. We can trace this gas using CO emission, converting the observed CO intensity into the H2 gas mass of the region using the CO-to-H2 conversion factor (⁠_CO⁠). In this paper, we use simulations to study the conversion factor and the molecular gas within galaxies. We analysed a suite of simulations of isolated disc galaxies, ranging from dwarfs to Milky Way-mass galaxies, that were run using the FIRE-2 subgrid models coupled to the CHIMES non-equilibrium chemistry solver. We use the non-equilibrium abundances from the simulations, and we also compare to results using abundances assuming equilibrium, which we calculate from the simulation in post-processing. Our non-equilibrium simulations are able to reproduce the relation between CO and H2 column densities, and the relation between _CO and metallicity, seen within observations of the Milky Way. We also compare to the xCOLD GASS survey, and find agreement with their data to our predicted CO luminosities at fixed star formation rate. We also find the multivariate function used by xCOLD GASS overpredicts the H2 mass for our simulations, motivating us to suggest an alternative multivariate function of our fitting, though we caution that this fitting is uncertain due to the limited range of galaxy conditions covered by our simulations. We also find that the non-equilibrium chemistry has little effect on the conversion factor (<5%) for our high-mass galaxies, though still affects the H2 mass and _CO by ≈25%

Diffusive propagation of cosmic rays from supernova remnants in the Galaxy. II: anisotropy

We investigate the effects of stochasticity in the spatial and temporal distribution of supernova remnants on the anisotropy of cosmic rays observed at Earth. The calculations are carried out for different choices of the diffusion coefficient D(E) for propagation in the Galaxy. The propagation and spallation of nuclei are taken into account. At high energies we assume that $D(E)\sim(E/Z)^{\delta}$, with $\delta=1/3$ and $\delta=0.6$ being the reference scenarios. The large scale distribution of supernova remnants in the Galaxy is modeled following the distribution of pulsars with and without accounting for the spiral structure of the Galaxy. Our calculations allow us to determine the contribution to anisotropy resulting from both the large scale distribution of SNRs in the Galaxy and the random distribution of the nearest remnants. The naive expectation that the anisotropy amplitude scales as D(E) is shown to be an oversimplification which does not reflect in the predicted anisotropy for any realistic distribution of the sources. The fluctuations in the anisotropy pattern are dominated by nearby sources, so that predicting or explaining the observed anisotropy amplitude and phase becomes close to impossible. We find however that the very weak energy dependence of the anisotropy amplitude below $10^{5}$ GeV and the rise at higher energies, can best be explained if the diffusion coefficient is $D(E)\sim E^{1/3}$. Faster diffusion, for instance with $\delta=0.6$, leads in general to an exceedingly large anisotropy amplitude. The spiral structure introduces interesting trends in the energy dependence of the anisotropy pattern, which qualitatively reflect the trend seen in the data. For large values of the halo size we find that the anisotropy becomes dominated by the large scale regular structure of the source distribution, leading indeed to a monotonic increase of $\delta_A$ with energy.Comment: 21 Pages, to appear in JCA