2 research outputs found
Formation of Compact Stellar Clusters by High-Redshift Galaxy Outflows III: Observability and Connection to Halo Globular Clusters
The early universe hosted a large population of low-mass virialized
"minihalos," that were not massive enough to form stars on their own. While
most minihalos were photoevaporated by ionizing photons from star-forming
galaxies, these galaxies also drove large outflows, which in some cases would
have reached the minihalos in advance of ionization fronts. In the previous
papers in this series, we carried out high-resolution, three-dimensional
adaptive mesh refinement simulations of outflow-minihalo interactions that
included non-equilibrium chemistry, radiative cooling, and turbulent mixing. We
found that, for a fiducial set of parameters, minihalos were transformed into
dense, chemically homogenous stellar clusters. Here we conduct a suite of
simulations that follow these interactions over a wide range of parameters
including minihalo mass, minihalo formation redshift, outflow energy, outflow
redshift, distance, concentration, and spin. In almost all cases, the shocked
minihalos form molecules through nonequillibrium reactions and then cool
rapidly to become compact, chemically-homogenous stellar clusters. Furthermore,
we show that the unique properties of these clusters make them a prime target
for direct study with the next generation of telescopes, and that there are
many reasons to suspect that their low-redshift counterparts are the observed
population of halo globular clusters.Comment: 19 pages, 17 figures. Accepted to the Astrophysical Journa