2011/11/30 by Philip F. Hopkins, Dusan Keres, Dušan Kereš +3 · 151 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Bulge #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Galaxy formation and evolution #Physics #Spiral galaxy #Star formation #Stars #Stellar mass #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.GA #astro-ph.SR
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2012.21981.x
published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 427(2), 968-978 (Oxford University Press) · 11 pages, 4 figures, MNRAS (Revised to match accepted version, additional numerical tests added). Movies of the simulations are available at https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~phopkins/Site/Movies_sbw.html
arxiv created 2012/10/22 · openalex publication_date 2012/11/05 · arxiv updated 2013/07/02 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We use numerical simulations of isolated galaxies to study the effects of stellar feedback on the formation and evolution of giant star-forming gas ‘clumps’ in high-redshift, gas-rich galaxies. Such galactic discs are unstable to the formation of bound gas-rich clumps whose properties initially depend only on global disc properties, not the microphysics of feedback. In simulations without stellar feedback, clumps turn an order-unity fraction of their mass into stars and sink to the centre, forming a large bulge and kicking most of the stars out into a much more extended stellar envelope. By contrast, strong radiative stellar feedback disrupts even the most massive clumps after they turn ∼10–20 per cent of their mass into stars, in a time-scale of ∼10–100 Myr, ejecting some material into a superwind and recycling the rest of the gas into the diffuse interstellar medium (ISM). This suppresses the bulge formation rate by direct ‘clump coalescence’ by a factor of several. However, the galactic discs do undergo significant internal evolution in the absence of mergers: clumps form and disrupt continuously and torque gas to the galactic centre. The resulting evolution is qualitatively similar to bar/spiral evolution in simulations with a more homogeneous ISM.