The Angular Momentum Problem in Cosmological Simulations of Disk Galaxy Formation (original) (raw)
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Formation of Disk Galaxies: Feedback and the Angular Momentum Problem
The Astrophysical Journal, 1999
Tree-SPH, numerical simulations of disk galaxy formation in a cosmological context are presented. For the "passive" variant of such simulations, i.e. simulations not including the effects of stellar feedback processes, it is found that the resulting disk "galaxies" are far too small and specific angular momentum deficient, by about a factor of 8 in size and about a factor of 20 in specific angular momentum, compared to real disk galaxies. Two routes towards solving this disk galaxy size and angular momentum problem are discussed: 1) Stellar feedback processes in cold and dense, protogalactic gas clouds and 2) Relatively early reheating and reionization of the Universe. Test simulations are presented, indicating that the first approach is a likely solution to the problem, whereas the second holds less promise, at least for large (Milky Way sized) disk galaxies.
Formation of Disk Galaxies in Computer Simulations
Advanced Science Letters, 2008
The formation of disk galaxies is one of the most outstanding problems in modern astrophysics and cosmology. We review the progress made by numerical simulations carried out on large parallel supercomputers. These simulations model the formation of disk galaxies within the current structure formation paradigm in which the Universe is dominated by a cold dark matter component and a cosmological constant. We discuss how computer simulations have been an essential tool in advancing the field further over the last decade or so. Recent progress stems from a combination of increased resolution and improved treatment of the astrophysical processes modeled in the simulations, such as the phenomenological description of the interstellar medium and of the process of star formation. We argue that high mass and spatial resolution is a necessary condition in order to obtain large disks comparable with observed spiral galaxies avoiding spurious dissipation of angular momentum. A realistic model of the star formation history. gas-to-stars ratio and the morphology of the stellar and gaseous component is instead controlled by the phenomenological description of the non-gravitational energy budget in the galaxy. This includes the energy injection by supernovae explosions as well as by accreting supermassive black holes at scales below the resolution. We continue by showing that simulations of gas collapse within cold dark matter halos including a phenomenological description of supernovae blast-waves allow to obtain stellar disks with nearly exponential surface density profiles as those observed in real disk galaxies, counteracting the tendency of gas collapsing in such halos to form cuspy baryonic profiles. However, the ab-initio formation of a realistic rotationally supported disk galaxy with a pure exponential disk in a fully cosmological simulation is still an open problem. We argue that the suppression of bulge formation is related to the physics of galaxy formation during the merger of the most massive protogalactic lumps at high redshift, where the reionization of the Universe likely plays a key role. A sufficiently high resolution during this early phase of galaxy formation is also crucial to avoid artificial angular momentum loss and spurious bulge formation. Finally, we discuss the role of mergers in disk formation, adiabatic halo contraction during the assembly of the disk, cold flows, thermal instability and other aspects of galaxy formation, focusing on their relevance to the puzzling origin of bulgeless galaxies.
Forming disc galaxies in ?CDM simulations
Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society, 2007
We used fully cosmological, high-resolution N-body + smooth particle hydrodynamic (SPH) simulations to follow the formation of disc galaxies with rotational velocities between 135 and 270 km s−1 in a Λ cold dark matter (CDM) universe. The simulations include gas cooling, star formation, the effects of a uniform ultraviolet (UV) background and a physically motivated description of feedback from supernovae (SNe). The host dark matter haloes have a spin and last major merger redshift typical of galaxy-sized haloes as measured in recent large-scale N-body simulations. The simulated galaxies form rotationally supported discs with realistic exponential scalelengths and fall on both the I band and baryonic Tully–Fisher relations. An extended stellar disc forms inside the Milky Way (MW)-sized halo immediately after the last major merger. The combination of UV background and SN feedback drastically reduces the number of visible satellites orbiting inside a MW-sized halo, bringing it in fair agreement with observations. Our simulations predict that the average age of a primary galaxy's stellar population decreases with mass, because feedback delays star formation in less massive galaxies. Galaxies have stellar masses and current star formation rates as a function of total mass that are in good agreement with observational data. We discuss how both high mass and force resolution and a realistic description of star formation and feedback are important ingredients to match the observed properties of galaxies.
The formation of disk galaxies in computer simulations
2008
The formation of disk galaxies is one of the most outstanding problems in modern astrophysics and cosmology. We review the progress made by numerical simulations carried out on large parallel supercomputers. Recent progress stems from a combination of increased resolution and improved treatment of the astrophysical processes modeled in the simulations, such as the phenomenological description of the interstellar medium
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2007
We perform controlled N-Body/SPH simulations of disk galaxy formation by cooling a rotating gaseous mass distribution inside equilibrium cuspy spherical and triaxial dark matter halos. We systematically study the angular momentum transport and the disk morphology as we increase the number of dark matter and gas particles from 10 4 to 10 6 , and decrease the gravitational softening from 2 kpc to 50 parsecs. The angular momentum transport, disk morphology and radial profiles depend sensitively on force and mass resolution. At low resolution, similar to that used in most current cosmological simulations, the cold gas component has lost half of its initial angular momentum via different mechanisms. The angular momentum is transferred primarily to the hot halo component, by resolution-dependent hydrodynamical and gravitational torques, the latter arising from asymmetries in the mass distribution. In addition, disk-particles can lose angular momentum while they are still in the hot phase by artificial viscosity. In the central disk, particles can transfer away over 99% of their initial angular momentum due to spiral structure and/or the presence of a central bar. The strength of this transport also depends on force and mass resolution -large softening will suppress the bar instability, low mass resolution enhances the spiral structure. This complex interplay between resolution and angular momentum transfer highlights the complexity of simulations of galaxy formation even in isolated haloes. With 10 6 gas and dark matter particles, disk particles lose only 10-20% of their original angular momentum, yet we are unable to produce pure exponential profiles due to the steep density peak of baryons within the central kpc. We speculate that the central luminosity excess observed in many Sc-Sd galaxies may be due to star-formation in gas that has been transported to the central regions by spiral patterns.
Stochastic angular momentum slews and flips and their effect on discs in galaxy formation models
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2014
The angular momentum of galactic discs in semi-analytic models of galaxy formation is usually updated in time as material is accreted to the disc by adopting a constant dimensionless spin parameter and little attention is paid to the effects of accretion with misaligned angular momenta. These effects are the subject of this paper, where we adopt a Monte Carlo simulation for the changes in the direction of the angular momentum of a galaxy disc as it accretes matter based on accurate measurements from dark-matter haloes in the Millennium II simulation. In our semi-analytic model implementation, the flips seen in the dark-matter haloes are assumed to be the same for the cold baryons; however, we also assume that in the latter the flip also entails a difficulty for the disc to increase its angular momentum which causes the disc to become smaller relative to a no-flip case. This makes star formation to occur faster, especially in low-mass galaxies at all redshifts allowing galaxies to reach higher stellar masses faster. We adopt a new condition for the triggering of starbursts during mergers. As these produce the largest flips it is natural to adopt the disc instability criterion to evaluate the triggering of bursts in mergers instead of one based on mass ratios as in the original model. The new implementation reduces the average lifetimes of discs by a factor of ∼2, while still allowing old ages for the present-day discs of large spiral galaxies. It also provides a faster decline of star formation in massive galaxies and a better fit to the bright end of the luminosity function at z = 0.
Forming Disk Galaxies in Lambda CDM Simulations
Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society, 2006
We used fully cosmological, high resolution N-body + SPH simulations to follow the formation of disk galaxies with rotational velocities between 135 and 270 km/sec in a ΛCDM universe. The simulations include gas cooling, star formation, the effects of a uniform UV background and a physically motivated description of feedback from supernovae. The host dark matter halos have a spin and last major merger redshift typical of galaxy sized halos as measured in recent large scale N-Body simulations. The simulated galaxies form rotationally supported disks with realistic exponential scale lengths and fall on both the I-band and baryonic Tully Fisher relations. An extended stellar disk forms inside the Milky Way sized halo immediately after the last major merger. The combination of UV background and SN feedback drastically reduces the number of visible satellites orbiting inside a Milky Way sized halo, bringing it in fair agreement with observations. Our simulations predict that the average age of a primary galaxy's stellar population decreases with mass, because feedback delays star formation in less massive galaxies. Galaxies have stellar masses and current star formation rates as a function of total mass that are in good agreement with observational data. We discuss how both high mass and force resolution and a realistic description of star formation and feedback are important ingredients to match the observed properties of galaxies.
Galaxy Formation and the Cosmological Angular Momentum Problem
Astrophysics and Space Science Library, 2004
The importance of angular momentum in regulating the sizes of galactic disks and by this their star formation history is highlighted. Tidal torques and accretion of satellites in principle provide enough angular momentum to form disks with sizes that are in agreement with observations. However three major problems have been identified that challenge cold dark matter theory and affect models of galaxy evolution: (1) too much angular momentum is transferred from the gas to the dark halos during infall, leading to disks with scale lengths that are too small, (2) bulgeless disks require more specific angular momentum than is generated cosmologically even if gas would not lose angular momentum during infall, (3) gravitational torques and hierarchical merging produce a specific angular momentum distribution that does not match the distribution required to form exponential disks naturally; some gas has exceptionally high angular momentum, leading to extended outer disks while another large gas fraction will contain very little specific angular momentum and is expected to fall into the galactic center, forming a massive and dominant bulge component. Any selfconsistent theory of galaxy formation will require to provide solutions to these questions. Selective mass loss of low-angular-momentum gas in an early phase of galaxy evolution currently seems to be the most promising scenario. Such a process would have a strong affect on the early protogalactic evolution phase, the origin and evolution of galactic morphologies and link central properties of galaxies like the origin of central massive black holes with their global structure.
Mergers and Formation of Disk Galaxies in Hierarchically Clustering Universes
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, 1996
New simulations are presented which investigate the formation of smaller groups of galaxies in a CDM like universe. The simulations follow the evolution of dark matter and gas and are performed with an SPH code adapted for the special-purpose hardware GRAPE. The mass resolution in the baryonic component is 5 10^6 Msol, the spatial resolution is 1.5 kpc. A sufficiently large volume is simulated in order to accurately include the tidal field and the mass inflow. The mass resolution enables us to resolve the galaxies formed in the simulation. Individual properties of the galaxies, each consisting of several thousand particles, can also be investigated. It turns out, that in the center of the dark haloes the gas accumulates to form a rotationally supported disk. However, in comparison with observations, disks which form in numerical simulations are too concentrated: Due to the merging of substructures, angular momentum is transported from the gas to the dark halo, and far too much gas is accumulated at very small radii. It is argued that changing the cosmogony (e.g. to low Omega) or adding photoionisation due to an external UV background do not provide an easy fix to the angular momentum problem. Feedback processes caused by supernovae or stellar winds seem to be the most likely solution to this problem.
Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Disks, 2008
We present a new set of multi-million particle SPH simulations of the formation of disk dominated galaxies in a cosmological context. Some of these galaxies are higher resolution versions of the models already described in Governato et al (2007). To correctly compare simulations with observations we create artificial images of our simulations and from them measure photometric bulge to disk (B/D) ratios and disk scale lengths. We show how feedback and high force and mass resolution are necessary ingredients to form galaxies that have flatter rotation curves, larger I-band disk scale lengths and smaller B/D ratios. A new simulated disk galaxy has an I-band disk scale length of 9.2 kpc and a B/D flux ratio of 0.64 (face on, dust reddened).