VERTICO. IV. Environmental effects on the gas distribution and star formation efficiency of Virgo cluster spirals

GalaxiesInterstellar matter and star formatio

VERTICO: The Virgo Environment Traced in CO Survey

Galaxie

How to get cool in the heat: comparing analytic models of hot, cold, and cooling gas in haloes and galaxies with EAGLE

We use the hydrodynamic, cosmological EAGLE simulations to investigate how the hot gas in haloes condenses to form and grow galaxies. We select haloes from the simulations that are actively cooling and study the temperature, distribution and metallicity of their hot, cold and transitioning ‘cooling’ gas, placing these in the context of semi-analytic models. Our selection criteria lead us to focus on Milky Way-like haloes. We find that the hot-gas density profiles of the haloes form a progressively stronger core over time, the nature of which can be captured by a β profile that has a simple dependence on redshift. In contrast, the hot gas that will cool over a time-step is broadly consistent with a singular isothermal sphere. We find that cooling gas carries a few times the specific angular momentum of the halo and is offset in spin direction from the rest of the hot gas. The gas loses ∼60 per cent of its specific angular momentum during the cooling process, generally remaining greater than that of the halo, and it precesses to become aligned with the cold gas already in the disc. We find tentative evidence that angular-momentum losses are slightly larger when gas cools on to dispersion-supported galaxies. We show that an exponential surface density profile for gas arriving on a disc remains a reasonable approximation, but a cusp containing ∼20 per cent of the mass is always present, and disc scale radii are larger than predicted by a vanilla Fall & Efstathiou model. These scale radii are still closely correlated with the halo spin parameter, for which we suggest an updated prescription for galaxy formation models

Angular momentum evolution of galaxies in EAGLE

We use the EAGLE cosmological hydrodynamic simulation suite to study the specific angular momentum of galaxies, j, with the aims of (i) investigating the physical causes behind the wide range of j at fixed mass and (ii) examining whether simple, theoretical models can explain the seemingly complex and non-linear nature of the evolution of j. We find that j of the stars, jstars, and baryons, jbar, are strongly correlated with stellar and baryon mass, respectively, with the scatter being highly correlated with morphological proxies such as gas fraction, stellar concentration, (u−r) intrinsic colour, stellar age and the ratio of circular velocity to velocity dispersion. We compare with available observations at z = 0 and find excellent agreement. We find that jbar follows the theoretical expectation of an isothermal collapsing halo under conservation of specific angular momentum to within ≈50 per cent, while the subsample of rotation-supported galaxies are equally well described by a simple model in which the disc angular momentum is just enough to maintain marginally stable discs. We extracted evolutionary tracks of the stellar spin parameter of EAGLE galaxies and found that the fate of their jstars at z = 0 depends sensitively on their star formation and merger histories. From these tracks, we identified two distinct physical channels behind low jstars galaxies at z = 0: (i) galaxy mergers, and (ii) early star formation quenching. The latter can produce galaxies with low jstars and early-type morphologies even in the absence of mergers

Quantifying the impact of mergers on the angular momentum of simulated galaxies

We use EAGLE to quantify the effect galaxy mergers have on the stellar specific angular momentum of galaxies, jstars. We split mergers into dry (gas-poor)/wet (gas-rich), major/minor and different spin alignments and orbital parameters. Wet (dry) mergers have an average neutral gas-to-stellar mass ratio of 1.1 (0.02), while major (minor) mergers are those with stellar mass ratios ≥0.3 (0.1–0.3). We correlate the positions of galaxies in the jstars–stellar mass plane at z = 0 with their merger history, and find that galaxies of low spins suffered dry mergers, while galaxies of normal/high spins suffered predominantly wet mergers, if any. The radial jstars profiles of galaxies that went through dry mergers are deficient by ≈0.3 dex at r ≲ 10 r50 (with r50 being the half-stellar mass radius), compared to galaxies that went through wet mergers. Studying the merger remnants reveals that dry mergers reduce jstars by ≈30 per cent, while wet mergers increase it by ≈10 per cent, on average. The latter is connected to the build-up of the bulge by newly formed stars of high rotational speed. Moving from minor to major mergers accentuates these effects. When the spin vectors of the galaxies prior to the dry merger are misaligned, jstars decreases by a greater magnitude, while in wet mergers corotation and high orbital angular momentum efficiently spun-up galaxies. We predict what would be the observational signatures in the jstars profiles driven by dry mergers: (i) shallow radial profiles and (ii) profiles that rise beyond ≈10 r50, both of which are significantly different from spiral galaxies

Around the hybrid conference world in the COVID-19 era

Science Communication and Societ

Cosmic CARNage I: on the calibration of galaxy formation models

We present a comparison of nine galaxy formation models, eight semi-analytical, and one halo occupation distribution model, run on the same underlying cold dark matter simulation (cosmological box of comoving width 125h−1 Mpc, with a dark-matter particle mass of 1.24 × 109h−1M⊙) and the same merger trees. While their free parameters have been calibrated to the same observational data sets using two approaches, they nevertheless retain some ‘memory’ of any previous calibration that served as the starting point (especially for the manually tuned models). For the first calibration, models reproduce the observed z = 0 galaxy stellar mass function (SMF) within 3σ. The second calibration extended the observational data to include the z = 2 SMF alongside the z ∼ 0 star formation rate function, cold gas mass, and the black hole–bulge mass relation. Encapsulating the observed evolution of the SMF from z = 2 to 0 is found to be very hard within the context of the physics currently included in the models. We finally use our calibrated models to study the evolution of the stellar-to-halo mass (SHM) ratio. For all models, we find that the peak value of the SHM relation decreases with redshift. However, the trends seen for the evolution of the peak position as well as the mean scatter in the SHM relation are rather weak and strongly model dependent. Both the calibration data sets and model results are publicly available