On the origin of the HI holes in the interstellar medium of dwarf irregular galaxies

Abstract

We suggest that large HI holes observed in the interstellar medium (ISM) of galaxies such as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Holmberg II (Ho II, DDO 50, UGC 4305) can form as the combined result of turbulence coupled to thermal and gravitational instabilities. We investigate this problem with three dimensional hydrodynamical simulations, taking into account cooling and heating processes and the action of the self-gravity of the gas. We construct an algorithm for radiative transfer to post-process the simulated data and build emission maps in the 21 cm neutral hydrogen line. With this approach, we are able to reproduce the structure of the shells and holes as observed in regions of the ISM, where no stellar activity is detected. In order to quantify the comparison of our synthetic maps to the observations, we calculate the physical scale-autocorrelation length relation (L-L_{cr} relation) both on the synthetic HI maps and the HI map of Ho II. The L-L_{cr} relation shows a linear increase of the autocorrelation length with the physical scale up to the scale of energy injection and flattens for larger scales. The comparison of the L-L_{cr} relation between the observations and the synthetic maps suggests that turbulence is driven in the ISM of Ho II on large scales (~ 6 kpc). The slope of the L-L_{cr} relation in the linear regime in Ho II is better reproduced by models where turbulence is coupled with a weak efficiency cooling of the gas. These results demonstrate the importance of the interplay between turbulence and the thermodynamics of the gas for structure formation in the ISM. Our analysis can be used to determine the scale on which kinetic energy is injected in the ISM of dwarf irregular galaxies, and to derive, in a first approximation, the cooling rate of the gas.