We explore galaxy properties and their link with environment and clustering using a population of ~1000 galaxies formed in a high resolution hydrodynamic simulation of the Lambda CDM cosmology. At the redshift we concentrate on, z=1, the spatial resolution is 1.4 proper kpc/h and Milky-way sized disk galaxies contain ~10^5 particles within their virial radii. We include supermassive black hole accretion and feedback as well as a multiphase model for star formation. We find that a number of familiar qualitative relationships hold approximately between galaxy properties, for example, galaxies lie between two broad extremes of type, where ``late'' types tend to be smaller in size, have lower circular velocities, younger stars, higher star formation rates, larger disk to bulge ratios and lower Sersic indices than ``early types''. As in previous studies the stellar component of disk galaxies is not as rotationally supported as in observations. Bulges contain too much of the stellar mass, although disks do have scale lengths compatible with observations. The addition of black hole physics to the simulations does not appear to have an impact on the angular momentum results, nor do we find that it is affected in an identical simulation with significantly lower mass resolution. Despite this, we can profitably use the rank order of either disk to total ratio, Sersic index, or galaxy age to separate galaxies into morphological classes and examine the density-morphology relation and morphology dependence of clustering. We find that while at redshift z=0, the well known preponderance of early types in dense environments is seen, at z=1 the density-morphology relation becomes flatter and late type galaxies are even seen to have a higher clustering amplitude than early types (abridged).
We investigate the origins of galaxy morphology (defined by bulge-to-total K-band luminosity) in the LambdaCDM cosmology using two galaxy formation models ,based on the Millennium simulation, by Bower et al. (the Durham model) and De Lucia & Blaizot (the MPA model). There are many similarities, but also fundamental disagreements in the predictions of the two models for galaxy morphology. For example, taking into account uncertainties in the available observational data, both produce a realistic morphological mix today, but its evolution is very different. A main cause of this and other differe…
(abridged) The observed properties of supermassive black holes suggest a fundamental link between their assembly and the formation of their host spheroids. We model the growth and activity of black holes in galaxies using LambdaCDM cosmological hydrodynamic simulations by following the evolution of the baryonic mass component in galaxy potential wells. We find that the observed steep relation between black hole mass and spheroid velocity dispersion, M_BH propto σ^4, is reproduced if the gas mass in bulges is linearly proportional to the black hole mass. In this model, black hole growth saturat…
N--body + hydrodynamical simulations of formation and evolution of galaxy groups in a LambdaCDM cosmology have been performed. The properties of the galaxy populations in 12 groups are here discussed, with focus on the colour-magnitude relation in both normal and fossil groups.
Recent Chandra and XMM-Newton observations of galaxy cluster cooling flows have revealed X-ray emission voids of up to 30 kpc in size that have been identified with buoyant, magnetized bubbles. Motivated by these observations, we have investigated the behavior of rising bubbles in stratified atmospheres using the FLASH adaptive-mesh simulation code. We present results from 2-D simulations with and without the effects of magnetic fields, and with varying bubble sizes and background stratifications. We find purely hydrodynamic bubbles to be unstable; a dynamically important magnetic field is req…
We performed SPH simulations to study the nuclear morphology of a barred galaxy NGC 4314. We have constructed the mass models based on the results of a profile decomposition into disk, bulge, and bar components. Our models have three different nuclear structures according to the assumption about the nuclear bar: no nuclear bar, a synchronous nuclear bar and a fast nuclear bar. Our SPH simulations show that the morphology of the nuclear region of NGC 4314 which is characterized by an elongated ring/spiral of newly formed stars and HII regions, aligned nearly parallel to the primary bar can be u…
We describe hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation in a Lambda cold dark matter (CDM) cosmology performed using a subresolution model for star formation and feedback in a multiphase interstellar medium (ISM). In particular, we demonstrate the formation of a well-resolved disk galaxy. The surface brightness profile of the galaxy is exponential, with a B-band central surface brightness of 21.0 mag arcsec^-2 and a scale-length of R_d = 2.0 h^-1 kpc. We find no evidence for a significant bulge component. The simulated galaxy falls within the I-band Tully-Fisher relation, with an absolute m…
Theory and observations reveal fatal flaws in the standard LambdaCDM model. The cold dark matter hierarchical clustering paradigm predicts a gradual bottom-up growth of gravitational structures assuming linear, collisionless, ideal flows and unrealistic CDM condensations and mergers. Collisional fluid mechanics with viscosity, turbulence, and diffusion predicts a turbulent big bang and top-down viscous-gravitational fragmentation from supercluster to galaxy scales in the plasma epoch, as observed from 0.3 Gpc void sizes, 1.5 Gpc spins and Kolmogorov-fingerprint-turbulence-signatures in the CMB…
We present 3D hydrodynamical simulations of a precessing jet propagating inside a supernova remnant (SNR) shell, particularly applied to the W50-SS433 system in a search for the origin of its peculiar elongated morphology. Several runs were carried out with different values for the mass loss rate of the jet, the initial radius of the SNR, and the opening angle of the precession cone. We found that our models successfully reproduce the scale and morphology of W50 when the opening angle of the jets is set to 10$\degr$ or if this angle linearly varies with time. For these models, more realistic r…
We take advantage of the largest high-resolution simulation of cosmic structure growth ever carried out -- the Millennium Simulation of the concordance LambdaCDM cosmogony -- to study how the star formation histories, ages and metallicities of elliptical galaxies depend on environment and on stellar mass. We concentrate on a galaxy formation model which is tuned to fit the joint luminosity/colour/morphology distribution of low redshift galaxies. Massive ellipticals in this model have higher metal abundances, older luminosity-weighted ages, shorter star formation timescales, but lower assembly …
We present results on the X-ray properties of clusters and groups of galaxies, extracted from a large hydrodynamical simulation. We used the GADGET code to simulate a LambdaCDM model within a box of 192 Mpc/h on a side, with 480^3 dark matter particles and as many gas particles. The simulation includes radiative cooling, star formation and supernova feedback. The simulated M-T relation is consistent with observations once we mimic the procedure for mass estimates applied to real clusters. Also, with the adopted choices of Omega_m=0.3 and sigma_8=0.8 the resulting XTF agrees with observational …
Gas and stars in spiral galaxies are modelled with the DUAL code, using hydrodynamic and N-body techniques. The simulations reveal morphological differences mirroring the dual morphologies seen in B and K' band observations of many spiral galaxies. In particular, the gaseous images are more flocculent with lower pitch angles than the stellar images, and the stellar arm-interarm contrast correlates with the degree of morphological decoupling.
NGC 6782 is an early-type barred spiral galaxy exhibiting a rich and complex morphology with multiple ring patterns. To provide a physical understanding of its structure and kinematical properties, two-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations have been carried out. Numerical calculations reveal that the striking features in NGC 6782 can be reproduced provided that the gas flow is governed by the gravitational potential associated with a slowly rotating strong bar. In particular, the response of the gaseous disk to the bar potential leads to the excitation of spiral density waves at the inner Lin…
We have studied the radial distribution of the early (E/S0) and late (S/Irr) types of satellites around bright host galaxies. We made a volume-limited sample of 4,986 satellites brighter than M_r = -18.0 associated with 2,254 hosts brighter than M_r =-19.0 from the SDSS DR5 sample. The morphology of satellites is determined by an automated morphology classifier, but the host galaxies are visually classified. We found segregation of satellite morphology as a function of the projected distance from the host galaxy. The amplitude and shape of the early-type satellite fraction profile are found to…
(Abridged) We use a hydrodynamic simulation of a LambdaCDM model to predict the extragalactic X-ray background (XRB), focussing on emission from the intergalactic medium (IGM). We also include X-rays from point sources associated with galaxies in the simulation, and make maps of the angular distribution of the emission. We find that filaments in the maps are not evident, being diluted by projection. In the soft (0.5-2 keV) band, the mean intensity of radiation from intergalactic and cluster gas is 2.3*10^-12 ergdeg^-2cm^-2s^-1, 35% of the total soft band emission. This is compatible at the ~1 …
We compare the evolution of morphology in X-ray cluster data and in clusters obtained in a simulation of flat CDM, normalized to the observed cluster abundance. We find that the evolution rate in model clusters is significantly higher than in data clusters. The results is stricking, as our cluster data are all just for $z \simlt 0.2$, but is not contrary to expectations, as is known that the CDM spectrum is too flat, around the cluster scale, and therefore induces the presence of too many substructures. The cluster simulations were run using a TREESPH code and therefore include hydrodynamical …
The effects of wind-driven star formation feedback on the spatio-temporal organization of stars and gas in galaxies is studied using two-dimensional intermediate-representational quasi-hydrodynamical simulations. The model retains only a reduced subset of the physics, including mass and momentum conservation, fully nonlinear fluid advection, inelastic macroscopic interactions, threshold star formation, and momentum forcing by winds from young star clusters on the surrounding gas. Expanding shells of swept-up gas evolve through the action of fluid advection to form a ``turbulent'' network of in…
The problem of the resolution of turbulent flows in adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) simulations is investigated by means of 3D hydrodynamical simulations in an idealised setup, representing a moving subcluster during a merger event. AMR simulations performed with the usual refinement criteria based on local gradients of selected variables do not properly resolve the production of turbulence downstream of the cluster. Therefore we apply novel AMR criteria which are optimised to follow the evolution of a turbulent flow. We demonstrate that these criteria provide a better resolution of the flow pa…
We study the dependence of galaxy properties on the clustercentric radius and the environment attributed to the nearest neighbor galaxy using the SDSS galaxies associated with the Abell galaxy clusters. We find that there exists a characteristic scale where the properties of galaxies suddenly start to depend on the clustercentric radius at fixed neighbor environment. The characteristic scale is $1\sim 3$ times the cluster virial radius depending on galaxy luminosity. Existence of the characteristic scale means that the local galaxy number density is not directly responsible for the morphology-…
We present results from recent simulations of the formation and evolution of clusters of galaxies in a LambdaCDM cosmology. These simulations contain our most physically complete input physics to date including radiative cooling, star formation that transforms rapidly cooling material into aggregate star particles and we also model the thermal feedback from resulting supernovae in the star particles. We use an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) Eulerian hydrodynamics scheme to obtain very high spatial resolution (~ 2 kpc) in a computational volume 256 Mpc on a side with mass resolution for dark ma…
High-resolution X-ray observations have revealed cavities and `cold fronts' with sharp edges in temperature, density, and metallicity within galaxy clusters. Their presence poses a puzzle since these features are not expected to be hydrodynamically stable, or to remain sharp in the presence of diffusion. However, a moving core or bubble in even a very weakly magnetized plasma necessarily sweeps up enough magnetic field to build up a dynamically important sheath around the object; the layer's strength is set by a competition between `plowing up' of field and field lines slipping around the core…
We study the properties of the diffuse X-ray background by using the results of a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation of the concordance LambdaCDM model. The simulation follows gravitational and gas dynamics and includes a treatment of physical processes like radiative cooling, star formation and supernova feedback. From the simulation outputs, we produce a set of two-dimensional maps of the intergalactic medium X-ray emission integrated over redshift. We find that the signal in the soft (0.5-2 keV) band is lognormally distributed with a mean intensity of about 4 10^-12 erg s^-1 cm^-2 deg^-…
Are the morphologies of galaxies imprinted during an early and rapid formation epoch or are they due to environmental processes that subsequently transform galaxies between morphological classes? Recent numerical simulations demonstrate that the cluster environment can change the morphology of galaxies, even at a couple of cluster virial radii. The gravitational and hydrodynamical mechanisms that could perform such transformations were proposed in the 1970's, before the key observational evidence for environmental dependencies - the morphology-density relation and the Butcher-Oemler effect.
We present a hydrodynamical and chemical model for the globular cluster Omega Cen, under the assumption that it is the remnant of an ancient dwarf spheroidal galaxy (dSph), the bulk of which was disrupted and accreted by our Galaxy ~10 Gyr ago. We highlight the very different roles played by Type II and Type Ia supernovae (SNe) in the chemical enrichment of the inner regions of the putative parent dSph. While the SNe II pollute the interstellar medium rather uniformly, the SNe Ia ejecta may remain confined inside dense pockets of gas as long as succesive SNe II explosions spread them out. Star…
(abridged) We present new N-body, hydrodynamical simulations of the interaction between the starburst galaxy NGC 7714 and its post-starburst companion NGC 7715, focusing on the formation of the collisional features, including: 1) the gas-rich star forming bridge, 2) the large gaseous loop (and stellar tails) to the west of the system, 3) the very extended HI tail to the west and north of NGC 7714, and 4) the partial stellar ring in NGC 7714. Our simulations confirm the results of earlier work that an off-center inclined collision between two disk galaxies is almost certainly responsible for th…
A large set of TREESPH simulations is used to test the global morphology of galaxy clusters and its evolution against X-ray data. A powerful method to investigate substructures in galaxy clusters are the power ratios introduced by Buote & Tsai. We consider three flat cosmological models: CDM, LCDM($Ω_Λ= 0.7$) and CHDM($Ω_h = 0.2$, 1 massive $ν$), all normalized so to fit the observed number of clusters. For each model we built 40 clusters, using a TREESPH code, and performed a statistical comparison with a data sample including nearby clusters observed with ROSAT PSPC instrument. The compariso…
We observe a sharp transition from a singular, high-mass mode of star formation, to a low-mass dominated mode, in numerical simulations, at a metallicity of 10^-3 Zsolar. We incorporate a new method for including the radiative cooling from metals into adaptive mesh-refinement hydrodynamic simulations. Our results illustrate how metals, produced by the first stars, led to a transition from the high-mass star formation mode of Pop III stars, to the low-mass mode that dominates today. We ran hydrodynamic simulations with cosmological initial conditions in the standard LambdaCDM model, with metall…
We have performed hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation in a LCDM universe. We have followed galaxy formation in a dark matter halo, chosen to have a relatively quiet recent merger history, using different models for star formation and feedback. In all cases, we have adopted a multi-phase description of the interstellar medium and modelled star formation in quiescent and burst modes. We have explored two triggers for starbursts: strong shocks and high gas density, allowing for the possibility that stars in the burst may form with a top-heavy initial mass function. We find that the final…
We perform controlled N-Body/SPH simulations of disk galaxy formation by cooling a rotating gaseous mass distribution inside equilibrium cuspy spherical and triaxial dark matter halos. We systematically study the angular momentum transport and the disk morphology as we increase the number of dark matter and gas particles from 10^4 to 10^6, and decrease the gravitational softening from 2 kpc to 50 parsecs. The angular momentum transport, disk morphology and radial profiles depend sensitively on force and mass resolution. At low resolution, similar to that used in most current cosmological simul…