Gas in Motion: How Simulated Galaxies Control Their Star Formation

Claire Kopenhafer, Michigan State University

Photo of Claire Kopenhafer

Based on nearby present-day galaxy star formation rates and gas masses, galaxies are capable of turning all their gas into stars within only a few billion years. Additionally, galaxies exhibit relationships between their properties, such as their stellar mass and the mass of their dark matter halos, that strongly suggest they must somehow regulate the amount of stars they form over many billions of years. In recent years, the circumgalactic medium (CGM) has become an attractive host candidate for processes that refuel a galaxy's gas supply in a regulated manner. Using multi-physics hydrodynamics simulations of idealized single galaxies, we explore whether we can create a galaxy-CGM system that regulates its star formation and test how robust this system is to variations in initial conditions. We focus on one theoretical regulatory mechanism in particular, known as precipitation, that has been well developed analytically. In this talk, we discuss the numerical challenges of creating an idealized system that will evolve toward an equilibrium state in a reasonable amount of computation time and present preliminary results on the behavior of our simulated systems as they compare to the expected hallmarks of precipitation theory.

Abstract Author(s): Claire Kopenhafer