TY - JOUR A1 - Hani, Maan H. A1 - Ellison, Sara L. A1 - Sparre, Martin A1 - Grand, Robert J. J. A1 - Pakmor, Rüdiger A1 - Gómez, Facundo A. A1 - Springel, Volker T1 - The diversity of the circumgalactic medium around z=0 Milky Way-mass galaxies from the Auriga simulations JF - Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society N2 - Galaxies are surrounded by massive gas reservoirs ( i.e. the circumgalactic medium; CGM) which play a key role in their evolution. The properties of the CGM, which are dependent on a variety of internal and environmental factors, are often inferred from absorption line surveys which rely on a limited number of single lines-of-sight. In this work we present an analysis of 28 galaxy haloes selected from the Auriga project, a cosmological magneto-hydrodynamical zoom-in simulation suite of isolated MilkyWay-mass galaxies, to understand the impact of CGM diversity on observational studies. Although the Auriga haloes are selected to populate a narrow range in halo mass, our work demonstrates that the CGM of L-star galaxies is extremely diverse: column densities of commonly observed species span similar to 3-4 dex and their covering fractions range from similar to 5 to 90 per cent. Despite this diversity, we identify the following correlations: 1) the covering fractions ( CF) of hydrogen and metals of the Auriga haloes positively correlate with stellar mass, 2) the CF of H I, C IV, and Si II anticorrelate with active galactic nucleus luminosity due to ionization effects, and 3) the CF of H I, C IV, and Si II positively correlate with galaxy disc fraction due to outflows populating the CGM with cool and dense gas. The Auriga sample demonstrates striking diversity within the CGM of L-star galaxies, which poses a challenge for observations reconstructing CGM characteristics from limited samples, and also indicates that long-term merger assembly history and recent star formation are not the dominant sculptors of the CGM. KW - methods: numerical KW - galaxies: evolution KW - galaxies: haloes Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz1708 SN - 0035-8711 SN - 1365-2966 VL - 488 IS - 1 SP - 135 EP - 152 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bustamante, Sebastian A1 - Sparre, Martin A1 - Springel, Volker A1 - Grand, Robert J. J. T1 - Merger-induced metallicity dilution in cosmological galaxy formation simulations JF - Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society N2 - Observational studies have revealed that galaxy pairs tend to have lower gas-phase metallicity than isolated galaxies. This metallicity deficiency can be caused by inflows of low-metallicity gas due to the tidal forces and gravitational torques associated with galaxy mergers, diluting the metal content of the central region. In this work we demonstrate that such metallicity dilution occurs in state-of-the-art cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. We find that the dilution is typically 0.1 dex for major mergers, and is noticeable at projected separations smaller than 40 kpc. For minor mergers the metallicity dilution is still present, even though the amplitude is significantly smaller. Consistent with previous analysis of observed galaxies we find that mergers are outliers from the fundamental metallicity relation, with deviations being larger than expected for a Gaussian distribution of residuals. Our large sample of mergers within full cosmological simulations also makes it possible to estimate how the star formation rate enhancement and gas consumption timescale behave as a function of the merger mass ratio. We confirm that strong starbursts are likely to occur in major mergers, but they can also arise in minor mergers if more than two galaxies are participating in the interaction, a scenario that has largely been ignored in previous work based on idealised isolated merger simulations. KW - methods: numerical KW - galaxies: interactions KW - galaxies: star formation KW - galaxies: evolution Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty1692 SN - 0035-8711 SN - 1365-2966 VL - 479 IS - 3 SP - 3381 EP - 3392 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER -