TY - JOUR A1 - Sparre, Martin A1 - Whittingham, Joseph A1 - Damle, Mitali A1 - Hani, Maan H. A1 - Richter, Philipp A1 - Ellison, Sara L. A1 - Pfrommer, Christoph A1 - Vogelsberger, Mark T1 - Gas flows in galaxy mergers BT - supersonic turbulence in bridges, accretion from the circumgalactic medium, and metallicity dilution JF - Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society N2 - In major galaxy mergers, the orbits of stars are violently perturbed, and gas is torqued to the centre, diluting the gas metallicity and igniting a starburst. In this paper, we study the gas dynamics in and around merging galaxies using a series of cosmological magnetohydrodynamical zoom-in simulations. We find that the gas bridge connecting the merging galaxies pre-coalescence is dominated by turbulent pressure, with turbulent Mach numbers peaking at values of 1.6-3.3. This implies that bridges are dominated by supersonic turbulence, and are thus ideal candidates for studying the impact of extreme environments on star formation. We also find that gas accreted from the circumgalactic medium (CGM) during the merger significantly contributes (27-51 percent) to the star formation rate (SFR) at the time of coalescence and drives the subsequent reignition of star formation in the merger remnant. Indeed, 19-53 percent of the SFR at z = 0 originates from gas belonging to the CGM prior the merger. Finally, we investigate the origin of the metallicity-diluted gas at the centre of merging galaxies. We show that this gas is rapidly accreted on to the Galactic Centre with a time-scale much shorter than that of normal star-forming galaxies. This explains why coalescing galaxies are not well-captured by the fundamental metallicity relation. KW - MHD KW - methods: numerical KW - galaxies: interactions KW - galaxies: starburst Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stab3171 SN - 1365-2966 VL - 509 IS - 2 SP - 2720 EP - 2735 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Sparre, Martin A1 - Pfrommer, Christoph A1 - Vogelsberger, Mark T1 - The physics of multiphase gas flows BT - fragmentation of a radiatively cooling gas cloud in a hot wind JF - Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society N2 - Galactic winds exhibit a multiphase structure that consists of hot-diffuse and cold-dense phases. Here we present high-resolution idealized simulations of the interaction of a hot supersonic wind with a cold cloud with the moving-mesh code AREPO in setups with and without radiative cooling. We demonstrate that cooling causes clouds with sizes larger than the cooling length to fragment in 2D and 3D simulations. We confirm earlier 2D simulations by McCourt et al. (2018) and highlight differences of the shattering processes of 3D clouds that are exposed to a hot wind. The fragmentation process is quantified with a friends-of-friends analysis of shattered cloudlets and density power spectra. Those show that radiative cooling causes the power spectral index to gradually increase when the initial cloud radius is larger than the cooling length and with increasing time until the cloud is fully dissolved in the hot wind. A resolution of around 1 pc is required to reveal the effect of cooling-induced fragmentation of a 100 pc outflowing cloud. Thus, state-of-the-art cosmological zoom simulations of the circumgalactic medium fall short by orders of magnitudes from resolving this fragmentation process. This physics is, however, necessary to reliably model observed column densities and covering fractions of Lyman alpha haloes, high-velocity clouds, and broad-line regions of active galactic nuclei. KW - methods: numerical KW - ISM: jets and outflows KW - galaxies: formation Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty3063 SN - 0035-8711 SN - 1365-2966 VL - 482 IS - 4 SP - 5401 EP - 5421 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hani, Maan H. A1 - Sparre, Martin A1 - Ellison, Sara L. A1 - Torrey, Paul A1 - Vogelsberger, Mark T1 - Galaxy mergers moulding the circum-galactic medium BT - I. The impact of a major merger JF - Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society N2 - Galaxies are surrounded by sizeable gas reservoirs which host a significant amount of metals: the circum-galactic medium (CGM). The CGM acts as a mediator between the galaxy and the extragalactic medium. However, our understanding of how galaxy mergers, a major evolutionary transformation, impact the CGM remains deficient. We present a theoretical study of the effect of galaxy mergers on the CGM. We use hydrodynamical cosmological zoom-in simulations of a major merger selected from the Illustris project such that the z = 0 descendant has a halo mass and stellar mass comparable to the Milky Way. To study the CGM we then re-simulated this system at a 40 times better mass resolution, and included detailed post-processing ionization modelling. Our work demonstrates the effect the merger has on the characteristic size of the CGM, its metallicity, and the predicted covering fraction of various commonly observed gas-phase species, such as H I, C IV, and O VI. We show that merger-induced outflows can increase the CGM metallicity by 0.2-0.3 dex within 0.5 Gyr post-merger. These effects last up to 6 Gyr post-merger. While the merger increases the total metal covering fractions by factors of 2-3, the covering fractions of commonly observed UV ions decrease due to the hard ionizing radiation from the active galactic nucleus, which we model explicitly. Our study of the single simulated major merger presented in this work demonstrates the significant impact that a galaxy interaction can have on the size, metallicity, and observed column densities of the CGM. KW - methods: numerical KW - galaxies: evolution KW - galaxies: haloes KW - galaxies: interactions Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx3252 SN - 0035-8711 SN - 1365-2966 VL - 475 IS - 1 SP - 1160 EP - 1176 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Despali, Giulia A1 - Sparre, Martin A1 - Vegetti, Simona A1 - Vogelsberger, Mark A1 - Zavala, Jesús A1 - Marinacci, Federico T1 - The interplay of self-interacting dark matter and baryons in shaping the halo evolution JF - Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society N2 - We use high-resolution hydrodynamical simulation to test the difference of halo properties in cold dark matter (CDM) and a self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) scenario with a constant cross-section of sigma(T)/m(x) = 1 cm(2) g(-1). We find that the interplay between dark matter self-interaction and baryonic physics induces a complex evolution of the halo properties, which depends on the halo mass and morphological type, as well as on the halo mass accretion history. While high-mass haloes, selected as analogues of early-type galaxies, show cored profiles in the SIDM run, systems of intermediate mass and with a significant disc component can develop a profile that is similar or cuspier than in CDM. The final properties of SIDM haloes - measured at z = 0.2 - correlate with the halo concentration and formation time, suggesting that the differences between different systems are due to the fact that we are observing the impact of self-interaction. We also search for signatures of SIDM in the lensing signal of the main haloes and find hints of potential differences in the distribution of Einstein radii, which suggests that future wide-field survey might be able to distinguish between CDM and SIDM models on this basis. Finally, we find that the subhalo abundances are not altered in the adopted SIDM model with respect to CDM. KW - gravitational lensing: strong KW - methods: numerical KW - galaxies: haloes KW - dark matter Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz273 SN - 0035-8711 SN - 1365-2966 VL - 484 IS - 4 SP - 4563 EP - 4573 PB - Oxford University Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Damle, Mitali A1 - Sparre, Martin A1 - Richter, Philipp A1 - Hani, Maan H. A1 - Nuza, Sebastian A1 - Pfrommer, Christoph A1 - Grand, Robert J. J. A1 - Hoffman, Yehuda A1 - Libeskind, Noam A1 - Sorce, Jenny A1 - Steinmetz, Mathias A1 - Tempel, Elmo A1 - Vogelsberger, Mark A1 - Wang, Peng T1 - Cold and hot gas distribution around the Milky-Way – M31 system in the HESTIA simulations JF - Monthly notices of the royal astronomical society N2 - Recent observations have revealed remarkable insights into the gas reservoir in the circumgalactic medium (CGM) of galaxy haloes. In this paper, we characterise the gas in the vicinity of Milky Way and Andromeda analogues in the hestia (High resolution Environmental Simulations of The Immediate Area) suite of constrained Local Group (LG) simulations. The hestia suite comprise of a set of three high-resolution arepo-based simulations of the LG, run using the Auriga galaxy formation model. For this paper, we focus only on the 𝑧 = 0 simulation datasets and generate mock skymaps along with a power spectrum analysis to show that the distributions of ions tracing low-temperature gas (H i and Si iii) are more clumpy in comparison to warmer gas tracers (O vi, O vii and O viii). We compare to the spectroscopic CGM observations of M31 and low-redshift galaxies. hestia under-produces the column densities of the M31 observations, but the simulations are consistent with the observations of low-redshift galaxies. A possible explanation for these findings is that the spectroscopic observations of M31 are contaminated by gas residing in the CGM of the Milky Way. KW - software: data analysis KW - software: simulations KW - Galaxy: evolution KW - galaxies: evolution KW - galaxies: Local Group Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac663 SN - 0035-8711 SN - 1365-2966 VL - 512 SP - 3717 EP - 3737 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER -