3 research outputs found
Resolving the Formation of Protogalaxies. II. Central Gravitational Collapse
Numerous cosmological hydrodynamic studies have addressed the formation of
galaxies. Here we choose to study the first stages of galaxy formation,
including non-equilibrium atomic primordial gas cooling, gravity and
hydrodynamics. Using initial conditions appropriate for the concordance
cosmological model of structure formation, we perform two adaptive mesh
refinement simulations of ~10^8 M_sun galaxies at high redshift. The
calculations resolve the Jeans length at all times with more than 16 cells and
capture over 14 orders of magnitude in length scales. In both cases, the dense,
10^5 solar mass, one parsec central regions are found to contract rapidly and
have turbulent Mach numbers up to 4. Despite the ever decreasing Jeans length
of the isothermal gas, we only find one site of fragmentation during the
collapse. However, rotational secular bar instabilities transport angular
momentum outwards in the central parsec as the gas continues to collapse and
lead to multiple nested unstable fragments with decreasing masses down to
sub-Jupiter mass scales. Although these numerical experiments neglect star
formation and feedback, they clearly highlight the physics of turbulence in
gravitationally collapsing gas. The angular momentum segregation seen in our
calculations plays an important role in theories that form supermassive black
holes from gaseous collapse.Comment: Replaced with accepted version. To appear in ApJ v681 (July 1