TY - JOUR
T1 - An observational test for star formation prescriptions in cosmological hydrodynamical simulations
AU - Buck, Tobias
AU - Dutton, Aaron A.
AU - MacCiò, Andrea V.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the referee for an insightful report which helped us improve the manuscript. TB acknowledges support from the Son-derforschungsbereich SFB 881 The Milky Way System (subproject A2) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and by the European Research Council under ERC-CoG grant CRAGSMAN-646955. The authors gratefully acknowledge the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing e.V. (www.gauss-centre.eu) for funding this project by providing computing time on the GCS Supercomputer SuperMUC at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (http://www.lrz.de). This research was carried out on the High Performance Computing resources at New York University Abu Dhabi; Simulations have been performed on the ISAAC cluster of the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie and the HYDRA and DRACO clusters at the Rechenzentrum in Garching. This research made use of the PYN-BODY Pontzen et al. (2013), TANGOS Pontzen & Tremmel (2018), MATPLOTLIB (Hunter 2007), SCIPY (Jones et al. 2001) and NUMPY, IPYTHON AND JUPYTER (Walt, Colbert & Varoquaux 2011; Pérez & Granger 2007; Kluyver et al. 2016) PYTHON packages.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.
PY - 2019/6/11
Y1 - 2019/6/11
N2 - State-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation have reached the point at which their outcomes result in galaxies with ever more realism. Still, the employed sub-grid models include several free parameters such as the density threshold, n, to localize the star-forming gas. In this work, we investigate the possibilities to utilize the observed clustered nature of star formation (SF) in order to refine SF prescriptions and constrain the density threshold parameter. To this end, we measure the clustering strength, correlation length, and power-law index of the two-point correlation function of young (τ < 50 Myr) stellar particles and compare our results to observations from the HST Legacy Extragalactic UV Survey (LEGUS). Our simulations reveal a clear trend of larger clustering signal and power-law index and lower correlation length as the SF threshold increases with only mild dependence on galaxy properties such as stellar mass or specific star formation rate. In conclusion, we find that the observed clustering of SF is inconsistent with a low threshold for SF (n < 1 cm-3) and strongly favours a high value for the density threshold of SF (n > 10 cm-3), as, for example employed in the NIHAO project.
AB - State-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation have reached the point at which their outcomes result in galaxies with ever more realism. Still, the employed sub-grid models include several free parameters such as the density threshold, n, to localize the star-forming gas. In this work, we investigate the possibilities to utilize the observed clustered nature of star formation (SF) in order to refine SF prescriptions and constrain the density threshold parameter. To this end, we measure the clustering strength, correlation length, and power-law index of the two-point correlation function of young (τ < 50 Myr) stellar particles and compare our results to observations from the HST Legacy Extragalactic UV Survey (LEGUS). Our simulations reveal a clear trend of larger clustering signal and power-law index and lower correlation length as the SF threshold increases with only mild dependence on galaxy properties such as stellar mass or specific star formation rate. In conclusion, we find that the observed clustering of SF is inconsistent with a low threshold for SF (n < 1 cm-3) and strongly favours a high value for the density threshold of SF (n > 10 cm-3), as, for example employed in the NIHAO project.
KW - ISM: structure
KW - cosmology: dark matter
KW - galaxies: formation
KW - galaxies: star formation
KW - galaxies: structure
KW - methods: N-body simulation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85072254181&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85072254181&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/mnras/stz969
DO - 10.1093/mnras/stz969
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85072254181
SN - 0035-8711
VL - 486
SP - 1481
EP - 1487
JO - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
JF - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
IS - 1
ER -