A. D'Ercole — Page 3

arXiv1998

The Influence of Stellar Energetics and Dark Matter on the Chemical Evolution of Dwarf Irregulars

A chemical evolution model following the evolution of the abundances of H, He, C, N, O and Fe for dwarf irregular and blue compact galaxies is presented. This model takes into account detailed nucleosynthesis and computes in detail the rates of supernovae of type II and I. The star formation is assumed to have proceeded in short but intense bursts. The novelty relative to previous models is that the development of a galactic wind is studied in detail by taking into account the energy injected into the interstellar medium (ISM) from both supernovae and stellar winds from massive stars as well as the presence of dark matter halos. Both metal enriched and normal winds have been considered. Our main conclusions are: i) a substantial amount of dark matter (from 1 to 50 times larger than the luminous matter) is required in order to avoid the complete destruction of such galaxies during strong starbursts, and ii) the energy injected by stellar winds and type Ia supernovae into the ISM is negligible relative to the total thermal energy, and in particular to the type II supernovae, which in fact, dominate the energetics during starbursts.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1997

Decoupled and inhomogeneous gas flows in S0 galaxies

A recent analysis of the "Einstein" sample of early-type galaxies has revealed that at any fixed optical luminosity Lb S0 galaxies have lower mean X-ray luminosity Lx per unit Lb than ellipticals. Following a previous analytical investigation of this problem (Ciotti & Pellegrini 1996), we have performed 2D numerical simulations of the gas flows inside S0 galaxies in order to ascertain the effectiveness of rotation and/or galaxy flattening in reducing the Lx/Lb ratio. The flow in models without SNIa heating is considerably ordered, and essentially all the gas lost by the stars is cooled and accumulated in the galaxy center. If rotation is present, the cold material settles in a disk on the galactic equatorial plane. Models with a time decreasing SNIa heating host gas flows that can be much more complex. After an initial wind phase, gas flows in energetically strongly bound galaxies tend to reverse to inflows. This occurs in the polar regions, while the disk is still in the outflow phase. In this phase of strong decoupling, cold filaments are created at the interface between inflowing and outflowing gas. Models with more realistic values of the dynamical quantities are preferentially found in the wind phase with respect to their spherical counterparts of equal Lb. The resulting Lx of this class of models is lower than in spherical models with the same Lb and SNIa heating. At variance with cooling flow models, rotation is shown to have only a marginal effect in this reduction, while the flattening is one of the driving parameters for such underluminosity, in accordance with the analytical investigation.

astro-ph↗