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T. Naab

Publications and source records attributed to T. Naab.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
arXiv2011

The SINS survey of z~2 galaxy kinematics: properties of the giant star forming clumps

We have studied the properties of giant star forming clumps in five z~2 star-forming disks with deep SINFONI AO spectroscopy at the ESO VLT. The clumps reside in disk regions where the Toomre Q-parameter is below unity, consistent with their being bound and having formed from gravitational instability. Broad Hα/[NII] line wings demonstrate that the clumps are launching sites of powerful outflows. The inferred outflow rates are comparable to or exceed the star formation rates, in one case by a factor of eight. Typical clumps may lose a fraction of their original gas by feedback in a few hundred million years, allowing them to migrate into the center. The most active clumps may lose much of their mass and disrupt in the disk. The clumps leave a modest imprint on the gas kinematics. Velocity gradients across the clumps are 10-40 km/s/kpc, similar to the galactic rotation gradients. Given beam smearing and clump sizes, these gradients may be consistent with significant rotational support in typical clumps. Extreme clumps may not be rotationally supported; either they are not virialized, or they are predominantly pressure supported. The velocity dispersion is spatially rather constant and increases only weakly with star formation surface density. The large velocity dispersions may be driven by the release of gravitational energy, either at the outer disk/accreting streams interface, and/or by the clump migration within the disk. Spatial variations in the inferred gas phase oxygen abundance are broadly consistent with inside-out growing disks, and/or with inward migration of the clumps.

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arXiv2011

Investigating the merger origin of Early-Type Galaxies using ultra-deep optical images

The mass assembly of galaxies leaves various imprints on their surroundings, such as shells, streams and tidal tails. The frequency and properties of these fine structures depend on the mechanism driving the mass assembly: e.g. a monolithic collapse, rapid cold-gas accretion followed by violent disk instabilities, minor mergers or major dry / wet mergers. Therefore, by studying the outskirts of galaxies, one can learn about their main formation mechanism. I present here our on-going work to characterize the outskirts of Early-Type Galaxies (ETGs), which are powerful probes at low redshift of the hierarchical mass assembly of galaxies. This work relies on ultra-deep optical images obtained at CFHT with the wide-field of view MegaCam camera of field and cluster ETGs obtained as part of the Atlas-3D and NGVS projects. State of the art numerical simulations are used to interpret the data. The images reveal a wealth of unknown faint structures at levels as faint as 29 mag arcsec-2 in the g-band. Initial results for two galaxies are presented here.

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arXiv2010

High-Redshift Star-Forming Galaxies: Angular Momentum and Baryon Fraction, Turbulent Pressure Effects and the Origin of Turbulence

The structure of a sample of high-redshift (z=2), rotating galaxies with high star formation rates and turbulent gas velocities of sigma=40-80 km/s is investigated. Fitting the observed disk rotational velocities and radii with a Mo, Mao, White (1998) (MMW) model requires unusually large disk spin parameters lambda_d>0.1 and disk-to-dark halo mass fraction m_d=0.2, close to the cosmic baryon fraction. The galaxies segregate into dispersion-dominated systems with 1 200 km/s, vmax/sigma>3 and rd=4-8 kpc. For the dispersion-dominated sample, radial pressure gradients partly compensate the gravitational force, reducing the rotational velocities. Including this pressure effect in the MMW model, dispersion-dominated galaxies can be fitted well with spin parameters lf lambda_d=0.03-0.05 for high disk mass fractions of m_d=0.2 and with lambda_d=0.01-0.03 for m_d=0.05. These values are in good agreement with cosmological expectations. For the rotation-dominated sample however pressure effects are small and better agreement with theoretically expected disk spin parameters can only be achieved if the dark halo mass contribution in the visible disk regime (2-3*rd) is smaller than predicted by the MMW model. We argue that these galaxies can still be embedded in standard cold dark matter halos if the halos did not contract adiabatically in response to disk formation. It is shown that the observed high turbulent gas motions of the galaxies are consistent with a Toomre instability parameter Q=1 which is equal to the critical value, expected for gravitational disk instability to be the major driver of turbulence. The dominant energy source of turbulence is then the potential energy of the gas in the disk.

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arXiv2010

The Effects of X-Ray and UV Background Radiation on the Low-Mass Slope of the Galaxy Mass Function

Even though the dark-matter power spectrum in the absence of biasing predicts a number density of halos n(M) ~ M^-2 (i.e. a Schechter alpha value of -2) at the low-mass end (M < 10^10 M_solar), hydrodynamic simulations have typically produced values for stellar systems in good agreement with the observed value alpha ~ -1. We explain this with a simple physical argument and show that an efficient external gas-heating mechanism (such as the UV background included in all hydro codes) will produce a critical halo mass below which halos cannot retain their gas and form stars. We test this conclusion with GADGET-2-based simulations using various UV backgrounds, and for the first time we also investigate the effect of an X-ray background. We show that at the present epoch alpha is depends primarily on the mean gas temperature at the star-formation epoch for low-mass systems (z <~ 3): with no background we find alpha ~ -1.5, with UV only alpha ~ -1.0, and with UV and X-rays alpha ~ -0.75. We find the critical final halo mass for star formation to be ~4x10^8 M_solar with a UV background and ~7x10^8 M_solar with UV and X-rays.

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arXiv2010

NGC6240: Merger-Induced Star Formation & Gas Dynamics

We present spatially resolved integral field spectroscopic K-band data at a resolution of 0.13" (60pc) and interferometric CO(2-1) line observations of the prototypical merging system NGC6240. Despite the clear rotational signature, the stellar kinematics in the two nuclei are dominated by dispersion. We use Jeans modelling to derive the masses and the mass-to-light ratios of the nuclei. Combining the luminosities with the spatially resolved Br-gamma equivalent width shows that only 1/3 of the K-band continuum from the nuclei is associated with the most recent star forming episode; and that less than 30% of the system's bolometric luminosity and only 9% of its stellar mass is due to this starburst. The star formation properties, calculated from typical merger star formation histories, demonstrate the impact of different assumptions about the star formation history. The properties of the nuclei, and the existence of a prominent old stellar population, indicate that the nuclei are remnants of the progenitor galaxies' bulges.

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arXiv2010

Simulating magnetic fields in the Antennae galaxies

We present self-consistent high-resolution simulations of NGC4038/4039 (the "Antennae galaxies") including star formation, supernova feedback and magnetic fields performed with the N-body/SPH code Gadget, in which magnetohydrodynamics are followed with the SPH method. We vary the initial magnetic field in the progenitor disks from 1 nG to 100 muG. At the time of the best match with the central region of the Antennae system the magnetic field has been amplified by compression and shear flows to an equilibrium field of approximately 10 muG, independent of the initial seed field. These simulations are a proof of the principle that galaxy mergers are efficient drivers for the cosmic evolution of magnetic fields. We present a detailed analysis of the magnetic field structure in the central overlap region. Simulated radio and polarization maps are in good morphological and quantitative agreement with the observations. In particular, the two cores with the highest synchrotron intensity and ridges of regular magnetic fields between the cores and at the root of the southern tidal arm develop naturally in our simulations. This indicates that the simulations are capable of realistically following the evolution of the magnetic fields in a highly non-linear environment. We also discuss the relevance of the amplification effect for present day magnetic fields in the context of hierarchical structure formation.

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arXiv2010

On the evolution of the intrinsic scatter in black hole versus galaxy mass relations

We present results on the evolution of the intrinsic scatter of black hole masses considering different implementations of a model in which black holes only grow via mergers. We demonstrate how merger driven growth affects the correlations between black hole mass and host bulge mass. The simple case of an initially log-normal distributed scatter in black hole and bulge masses combined with random merging within the galaxy population results in a decreasing scatter with merging generation/number as predicted by the Central-limit theorem. In general we find that the decrease in scatter σ is well approximated by σmerg(m) = σini \times (m + 1)^(-a/2) with a = 0.42 for a range of mean number of mergers m < 50. For a large mean number of mergers (m > 100) we find a convergence to a = 0.61. This is valid for a wide range of different initial distributions, refill-scenarios or merger mass-ratios. Growth scenarios based on halo merger trees of a (100 Mpc)^3 dark matter LambdaCDM-simulation show a similar behaviour with a scatter decrease of a = 0.30 with typical number of mergers m < 50 consistent with random merging (best matching model: a = 0.34). Assuming a present day scatter of 0.3 dex in black hole mass and a mean number of mergers not exceeding m = 50 our results imply a scatter of 0.6 dex at z = 3 and thus a possible scenario in which overmassive (and undermassive) black holes at high redshift are a consequence of a larger intrinsic scatter in black hole mass. A simple toy model connecting the growth of black holes to the growth of LambdaCDM dark matter halos via mergers, neglecting any contribution from accretion, yields a consistent M\cdot -MBulge relation at z = 0 - if we assume the correct initial relation.

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arXiv2010

A Study of the Gas-Star Formation Relation over Cosmic Time

We use the first systematic data sets of CO molecular line emission in z~1-3 normal star forming galaxies for a comparison of the dependence of galaxy-averaged star formation rates on molecular gas masses at low and high redshifts, and in different galactic environments. Although the current high-z samples are still small and biased toward the luminous and massive tail of the actively star-forming 'main-sequence', a fairly clear picture is emerging. Independent of whether galaxy integrated quantities or surface densities are considered, low- and high-z SFG galaxy populations appear to follow similar molecular gas-star formation relations with slopes 1.1 to 1.2. The gas-depletion time scale in these SFGs grows from 0.5 Gyrs at z~2 to 1.5 Gyrs at z~0. Because star formation depletion times are significantly smaller than the Hubble time at all redshifts sampled, star formation rates and gas fractions are set by the balance between gas accretion from the halo and stellar feedback. In contrast, very luminous gas rich major mergers at both low-z and high-z produce on average 4 to10 times more far-infrared luminosity per unit gas mass. Only some fraction of this difference can be explained by uncertainties in gas-mass or luminosity estimators; much of it must be intrinsic. The most likely interpretation is that the star formation relation is driven by global dynamical effects. For a given mass, the more compact merger systems produce stars more rapidly because their gas clouds are more compressed with shorter dynamical times, so that they churn more quickly through the available gas reservoir than the typical normal disk galaxies. When the dependence on galactic dynamical time scale is explicitly included, disk galaxies and mergers appear to follow similar gas to star-formation relations. The mergers may be forming stars at slightly higher efficiencies than the disks.

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arXiv2010

Formation of slowly rotating early-type galaxies via major mergers: a Resolution Study

We study resolution effects in numerical simulations of gas-rich and gas-poor major mergers, and show that the formation of slowly-rotating elliptical galaxies often requires a resolution that is beyond the present-day standards to be properly modelled. Our sample of equal-mass merger models encompasses various masses and spatial resolutions, ranging from about 200pc and 10^5 particles per component, typical of some recently published major merger simulations, to up to 32pc and 10^3 M_sun in simulations using 2.4 x 10^7 collisionless particles and 1.2 x 10^7 gas particles, among the highest resolutions reached so far for gas-rich major merger of massive disc galaxies. We find that the formation of fast-rotating early-type galaxies, that are flattened by a significant residual rotation, is overall correctly reproduced at all such resolutions. However, the formation of slow-rotating early-type galaxies, which have a low residual angular momentum and are supported mostly by anisotropic velocity dispersions, is strongly resolution-dependent. The evacuation of angular momentum from the main stellar body is largely missed at standard resolution, and systems that should be slow rotators are then found to be fast rotators. The effect is most important for gas-rich mergers, but is also witnessed in mergers with an absent or modest gas component. The effect is robust with respect to our initial conditions and interaction orbits, and originates in the physical treatment of the relaxation process during the coalescence of the galaxies. Our findings show that a high-enough resolution is required to accurately model the global properties of merger remnants and the evolution of their angular momentum. The role of gas-rich mergers of spiral galaxies in the formation of slow-rotating ellipticals may therefore have been underestimated.

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arXiv2010

High molecular gas fractions in normal massive star forming galaxies in the young Universe

Stars form from cold molecular interstellar gas. Since this is relatively rare in the local Universe, galaxies like the Milky Way form only a few new stars per year. Typical massive galaxies in the distant Universe formed stars an order of magnitude more rapidly. Unless star formation was significantly more efficient, this difference suggests that young galaxies were much more gas rich. Molecular gas observations in the distant Universe have so far been largely restricted to very luminous, rare objects, including mergers and quasars. Here we report the results of a systematic survey of molecular gas in samples of typical massive star forming galaxies at ~1.2 and 2.3, when the Universe was 40% and 24% of its current age. Our measurements provide empirical evidence that distant star forming galaxies indeed were gas rich, and that the star formation efficiency is not strongly dependent on cosmic epoch. The average fraction of cold gas relative to total galaxy baryonic mass at z= 2.3 and z=1.2 is ~44% and 34%, three to ten times higher than in today's massive spiral galaxies. The slow decrease between z~2 and 1 probably requires a mechanism of semi-continuous replenishment of fresh gas to the young galaxies.

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arXiv2009

An HI view of the on-going assembly of early-type galaxies: present and future observations

We present a preliminary analysis of the HI properties of early-type galaxies in the ATLAS3D sample. Using WSRT data for ~100 galaxies outside the Virgo cluster and data from the Alfalfa project for galaxies inside Virgo, we discuss the dependence of HI properties on environment. We detect HI in about half of the galaxies outside Virgo. For these systems, the HI morphology and kinematics change as a function of environment, going from regular, rotating systems around isolated galaxies to progressively more disturbed structures for galaxies with neighbours or in groups. In denser environment, inside Virgo, nearly none of the galaxies contains HI. We discuss future work in this field which will be enabled by next-generation, pre-SKA radio instruments. We present a simulated Apertif HI observation of an ATLAS3D early-type galaxy, showing how its appearance and detection level vary as a function of redshift.

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arXiv2009

Substructures formation induced by gravitational tides?

Physics lectures always refer to the tides as a disruptive effect. However, tides can also be compressive. When the potential of two galaxies overlap, as happens during a merger, fully compressive tides can develop and have a strong impact on the dynamics of substructures such as star clusters or tidal dwarf galaxies. Using N-body simulations of a large set of mergers, we noticed the importance of these tidal modes at cluster scale. With a model of the Antennae galaxies, we conclude that the positions and timescales of these tidal modes match the actual distribution of young clusters. A detailed study of the statistics of the compressive tides shows a stunning correlation between this purely gravitational effect and the observed properties of the star clusters. In this contribution, we introduce the concept of compressive tide and show its relevance in the special case of the Antennae galaxies. We extend our conclusions to a broad range of parameters and discuss their implications on several critical points such as the infant mortality, multiple star formation epochs in clusters or the age distribution.

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arXiv2009

Protostellar discs formed from turbulent cores

We investigate the collapse and fragmentation of low-mass, trans-sonically turbulent prestellar cores, using SPH simulations. The initial conditions are slightly supercritical Bonnor-Ebert spheres, all with the same density profile, the same mass (M_O=6.1 Msun) and the same radius (R_O=17,000 AU), but having different initial turbulent velocity fields. Four hundred turbulent velocity fields have been generated, all scaled so that the mean Mach number is M=1. Then a subset of these, having a range of net angular momenta, j, has been evolved. The evolution of these turbulent cores is not strongly correlated with j. Instead it is moderated by the formation of filamentary structures due to converging turbulent flows. A high fraction (~ 82%) of the protostars forming from turbulent cores are attended by protostellar accretion discs, but only a very small fraction (~16%) of these discs is sufficiently cool and extended to develop non-linear gravitational instabilities and fragment.

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arXiv2009

Protostellar disks formed from rigidly rotating cores

Abridged: We use three-dimensional SPH simulations to investigate the collapse of low-mass prestellar cores and the formation and early evolution of protostellar discs. The initial conditions are slightly supercritical Bonnor-Ebert spheres in rigid rotation. The core mass and initial radius are held fixed at M_O=6.1 M_sun and R_O=17,000 AU, and the only parameter that we vary is the initial angular speed Ω_O. Protostellar discs forming from cores with Ω_O<1.35 10d-13 1/s have radii between 100 and 300 AU and are quite centrally concentrated; due to heating by gas infall onto the disc and accretion onto the central object, they are also quite warm, T>100 K, and therefore stable against gravitational fragmentation. In contrast, more rapidly rotating cores form discs which are less concentrated and cooler, and have radii between 400 and 1000 AU; as a consequence they are prone to gravitational fragmentation and the formation of multiple systems. We derive a criterion that predicts whether a rigidly rotating core having given M_O, R_O and Ω_O will produce a protostellar disc which fragments whilst material is still infalling from the core envelope. We then apply this criterion to core samples for which M_O, R_O and Ω_O have been estimated observationally. We conclude that the observed cores are stable against fragmentation at this stage, due to their low angular speeds and the heat delivered at the accretion shock where the infalling material hits the disc.

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arXiv2009

VINE -- A numerical code for simulating astrophysical systems using particles I: Description of the physics and the numerical methods

We present a Fortran 95 code for simulating the evolution of astrophysical systems using particles to represent the underlying fluid flow. The code is designed to be versatile, flexible and extensible, with modular options that can be selected either at compile time or at run time. We include a number of general purpose modules describing a variety of physical processes commonly required in the astrophysical community. The code can be used as an N-body code to evolve a set of particles in two or three dimensions using either a Leapfrog or Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg integrator, with or without individual timesteps for each particle. Particles may interact gravitationally as $N$-body particles, and all or any subset may also interact hydrodynamically, using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamic (SPH) method. Massive point particles (`stars') which may accrete nearby SPH or $N$-body particles may also be included. The default free boundary conditions can be replaced by a module to include periodic boundaries. Cosmological expansion may also be included. An interface with special purpose `GRAPE' hardware may also be selected. If available, forces obtained from the GRAPE coprocessors may be transparently substituted for those obtained from the default tree based calculation. The code may be run without modification on single processors or in parallel using OpenMP compiler directives on large scale, shared memory parallel machines. In comparison to the Gadget-2 code of Springel 2005, the gravitational force calculation is $\approx 3.5 - 4.8$ times faster with VINE when run on 8 Itanium~2 processors in an SGI Altix, while producing nearly identical outcomes in our test problems. We present simulations of several test problems, including a merger simulation of two elliptical galaxies with 800000 particles.

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arXiv2009

VINE -- A numerical code for simulating astrophysical systems using particles II: Implementation and performance characteristics

We continue our presentation of VINE. We begin with a description of relevant architectural properties of the serial and shared memory parallel computers on which VINE is intended to run, and describe their influences on the design of the code itself. We continue with a detailed description of a number of optimizations made to the layout of the particle data in memory and to our implementation of a binary tree used to access that data for use in gravitational force calculations and searches for SPH neighbor particles. We describe modifications to the code necessary to obtain forces efficiently from special purpose `GRAPE' hardware. We conclude with an extensive series of performance tests, which demonstrate that the code can be run efficiently and without modification in serial on small workstations or in parallel using OpenMP compiler directives on large scale, shared memory parallel machines. We analyze the effects of the code optimizations and estimate that they improve its overall performance by more than an order of magnitude over that obtained by many other tree codes. Scaled parallel performance of the gravity and SPH calculations, together the most costly components of most simulations, is nearly linear up to maximum machine sizes available to us (120 processors on an Origin~3000). At similar accuracy, performance of VINE, used in GRAPE-tree mode, is approximately a factor two slower than that of VINE, used in host-only mode. Optimizations of the GRAPE/host communications could improve the speed by as much as a factor of three, but have not yet been implemented in VINE.

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arXiv2009

The halo merger rate in the Millennium Simulation and implications for observed galaxy merger fractions

We developed a new method to extract halo merger rates from the Millennium Simulation. First, by removing superfluous mergers that are artifacts of the FOF halo finder, we find a lower merger rate compared to previous work. The reductions are more significant at lower redshifts, lower halo masses, and minor mergers. Our approach agrees better with predictions from the EPS model. Second, we find that the FOF halo finder overestimates the halo mass by up to 50% for halos that are about to merge, which leads to an additional ~20% overestimate of the merger rate. Therefore, we define halo masses by including only gravitationally bound particles. We provide new best-fitting parameters for a global formula to account for these improvements. In addition, we extract the merger rate per progenitor halo, as well as per descendant halo. The former is the quantity that is related to observed galaxy merger fractions when they are measured via pair counting. At low mass/redshift the merger rate increases with mass and redshift. At high mass/redshift (for halos with masses a few times the "knee" of the mass function) these trends break down, and the merger rate per progenitor halo decreases with mass and increases only moderately with redshift. Defining the merger rate per progenitor halo also allows us to quantify the rate at which halos are being accreted onto larger halos. We provide an analytic formula to convert given merger rates per descendant halo into merger rates per progenitor halo. Finally, we perform a comparison between observed merger fractions and the fraction of halos that have undergone a major merger during the recent dynamical friction time, and find a fair agreement, within the large uncertainties of the observations. Our new halo merger trees are available at http://www.mpe.mpg.de/ir/MillenniumMergerTrees/.

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