Research Articles (Physics)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/726

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Browsing by Subject "Abundances – galaxies"

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    The neutral hydrogen content of galaxies in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations
    (Oxford University Press, 2013) Dave, Romeel; Katz, Neal; Oppenheimer, Benjamin D.; Kollmeier, Juna A.; Weinberg, David H.
    We examine the global HI properties of galaxies in quarter billion particle cosmological simulations using GADGET-2, focusing on howgalactic outflows impactHI content.We consider four outflow models, including a new one (ezw) motivated by recent interstellar medium simulations in which the wind speed and mass loading factor scale as expected for momentumdriven outflows for larger galaxies and energy-driven outflows for dwarfs (σ <75 km s−1). To obtain predicted HI masses, we employ a simple but effective local correction for particle selfshielding and an observationally constrained transition from neutral to molecular hydrogen. Our ezw simulation produces an HI mass function whose faint-end slope of −1.3 agrees well with observations from the Arecibo Fast Legacy ALFA survey; other models agree less well. Satellite galaxies have a bimodal distribution in HI fraction versus halo mass, with smaller satellites and/or those in larger haloes more often being HI deficient. At a given stellar mass, HI content correlates with the star formation rate and inversely correlates with metallicity, as expected if driven by stochasticity in the accretion rate. To higher redshifts, massive HI galaxies disappear and the mass function steepens. The global cosmic HI density conspires to remain fairly constant from z ∼ 5→0, but the relative contribution from smaller galaxies increases with redshift.
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    Theoretical evolution of optical strong lines across cosmic time
    (The American Astronomical Society, 2013) Kewley, Lisa J.; Dopita, Michael A.; Dave, Romeel; Leitherer, Claus; Yuan, Tiantian; Allen, Mark; Groves, Brent; Sutherland, Ralph
    We use the chemical evolution predictions of cosmological hydrodynamic simulations with our latest theoretical stellar population synthesis, photoionization, and shock models to predict the strong line evolution of ensembles of galaxies from z = 3 to the present day. In this paper, we focus on the brightest optical emission-line ratios, [N ii]/Hα and [O iii]/Hβ. We use the optical diagnostic Baldwin–Phillips–Terlevich (BPT) diagram as a tool for investigating the spectral properties of ensembles of active galaxies. We use four redshift windows chosen to exploit new near-infrared multi-object spectrographs. We predict how the BPT diagram will appear in these four redshift windows given different sets of assumptions. We show that the position of star-forming galaxies on the BPT diagram traces the interstellar medium conditions and radiation field in galaxies at a given redshift. Galaxies containing active galactic nucleus (AGN) form a mixing sequence with purely star-forming galaxies. This mixing sequence may change dramatically with cosmic time, due to the metallicity sensitivity of the optical emission-lines. Furthermore, the position of the mixing sequence may probe metallicity gradients in galaxies as a function of redshift, depending on the size of the AGN narrow-line region. We apply our latest slow shock models for gas shocked by galactic-scale winds. We show that at high redshift, galactic wind shocks are clearly separated from AGN in line ratio space. Instead, shocks from galactic winds mimic high metallicity starburst galaxies. We discuss our models in the context of future large near-infrared spectroscopic surveys.