2022/05/19 by Ulrich P. Steinwandel, Greg L. Bryan, Steinwandel, Ulrich P. +7 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2205.09774
openalex publication_date 2022/05/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
About ten to 20 percent of massive stars may be kicked out of their natal clusters before exploding as supernovae. These "runaway stars" might play a crucial role in driving galactic outflows and enriching the circumgalactic medium with metals. To study this effect, we carry out high resolution dwarf galaxy simulations that include velocity kicks to massive O/B stars above 8 M\odot. We consider two scenarios, one that adopts a power law velocity distribution for kick velocities, resulting in more stars with high velocity kicks, and a more moderate scenario with a Maxwellian velocity distribution. We explicitly resolve the multi-phase interstellar medium (ISM), and include non-equilibrium cooling and chemistry channels. We adopt a resolved feedback scheme (Griffin) where we sample individual massive stars from an IMF. We follow the lifetime of these stars and add their photoionising radiation, their UV radiation field, and their photoelectric heating rate to the surrounding gas. At the end of their lifetime we explode the massive population as core collapse supernovae (CCSN). In the simulations with runaway massive stars, we add additional (natal) velocity kicks that mimic two and three body interactions that cannot be fully resolved in our simulations. We find that the inclusion of runaway or walkaway star scenarios has an impact on mass, metal, momentum and energy outflows as well as the respective loading factors. We find an increase in mass, metal and momentum loading by a factor of 2-3, whereas we find an increase in the mean energy loading by a factor of 5 in the runaway case and a factor of 3 in the walkaway case. However, we find that the peak values are increased by a factor of up to 10, independent of the adopted velocity kick model. We conclude that the inclusion of runaway stars could have a significant impact on the global outflow properties of dwarf galaxies.