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arXiv 0706.0754astro-ph
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宇宙结构形成模拟中的金属冷却

Metal Cooling in Simulations of Cosmic Structure Formation

Britton D. Smith, Steinn Sigurdsson, Tom Abel

摘要:

向任何气体中添加金属都可以通过增加辐射冷却速率来显著改变其演变。在恒星形成的环境中,增强的冷却可能会导致碎片化和低质量恒星的形成,而无金属的气体云已经被证明不会碎片化。传统上,将金属冷却添加到数值模拟中需要在速度和精度之间做出选择。我们介绍了一种方法,使用复杂的化学网络的光电离软件,多云,包括辐射冷却从一套完整的金属高达原子序数30(锌),可用于大规模的三维流体动力学模拟。我们的方法适用于极大的温度范围(10 K < T < 10^8 K),直到氢数密度达到10^12 cm^-3。在这个密度下,一个1兆太阳的球体的半径大约为40天文单位。我们实现我们的方法在自适应网格细化(AMR)流体动力学/N体代码,恩佐。使用这种方法产生的冷却速率,我们研究了导致从第三星族到第二星族恒星形成的物理条件。虽然C,O,Fe和Si先前已被证明在低金属含量气体中对冷却的贡献最大,但我们发现,当太阳丰度模式存在时,高达40%的金属冷却来自S的精细结构发射。在金属丰度Z > 10^-4 Zsun时,存在密度和温度区域,在这些区域中气体都是热不稳定的,冷却时间小于动力学时间。我们确定这些双重不稳定的地区最诱导碎片。在高红移时,CMB抑制了低温下的有效冷却,因此减少了双不稳定区域的大小,使碎裂变得更加困难。

英文摘要:

The addition of metals to any gas can significantly alter its evolution by increasing the rate of radiative cooling. In star-forming environments, enhanced cooling can potentially lead to fragmentation and the formation of low-mass stars, where metal-free gas-clouds have been shown not to fragment. Adding metal cooling to numerical simulations has traditionally required a choice between speed and accuracy. We introduce a method that uses the sophisticated chemical network of the photoionization software, Cloudy, to include radiative cooling from a complete set of metals up to atomic number 30 (Zn) that can be used with large-scale three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations. Our method is valid over an extremely large temperature range (10 K < T < 10^8 K), up to hydrogen number densities of 10^12 cm^-3. At this density, a sphere of 1 Msun has a radius of roughly 40 AU. We implement our method in the adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) hydrodynamic/N-body code, Enzo. Using cooling rates generated with this method, we study the physical conditions that led to the transition from Population III to Population II star formation. While C, O, Fe, and Si have been previously shown to make the strongest contribution to the cooling in low-metallicity gas, we find that up to 40% of the metal cooling comes from fine-structure emission by S, when solar abundance patterns are present. At metallicities, Z > 10^-4 Zsun, regions of density and temperature exist where gas is both thermally unstable and has a cooling time less than its dynamical time. We identify these doubly unstable regions as the most inducive to fragmentation. At high redshifts, the CMB inhibits efficient cooling at low temperatures and, thus, reduces the size of the doubly unstable regions, making fragmentation more difficult.

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