Exploring the Effect of Active Galactic Nuclei on Quenching, Morphological Transformation and Gas Flows with Simulations of Galaxy Evolution

Download or read book Exploring the Effect of Active Galactic Nuclei on Quenching, Morphological Transformation and Gas Flows with Simulations of Galaxy Evolution written by Ryan Brennan and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We study the evolution of simulated galaxies in the presence of feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN). First, we present a study conducted with a semi-analytic model (SAM) of galaxy formation and evolution that includes prescriptions for bulge growth and AGN feedback due to galaxy mergers and disk instabilities. We find that with this physics included, our model is able to qualitatively reproduce a population of galaxies with the correct star-formation and morphological properties when compared with populations of observed galaxies out to z~3. We also examine the characteristic histories of galaxies with different star-formation and morphological properties in our model in order to draw conclusions about the histories of observed galaxies. Next, we examine the structural properties of galaxies (morphology, size, surface density) as a function of distance from the ``star-forming main sequence'' (SFMS), the observed correlation between the star formation rates (SFRs) and stellar masses of star-forming galaxies. We find that, for observed galaxies, as we move from galaxies above the SFMS (higher SFRs) to those below it (lower SFRs), there exists a nearly monotonic trend towards more bulge-dominated morphology, smaller radius, lower SFR density, and higher stellar density. We find qualitatively similar results for our model galaxies, again driven by our prescriptions for bulge growth and AGN feedback. Next, we conduct a study of the effect of AGN feedback on the gas in individual galaxies using a suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. We compare two sets of 24 galaxies with halo masses of 10^12 - 10^13.4 Msun run with two different feedback models: one which includes stellar feedback via UV heating, stellar winds and supernovae, AGN feedback via momentum-driven winds and X-ray heating, and metal heating via photoelectric heating and cosmic X-ray background heating from accreting black holes in background galaxies (MrAGN), and another model which is identical except that it does not include any AGN feedback (NoAGN). We find that our AGN feedback prescription acts both ``ejectively, '' removing gas from galaxies in powerful outflows, and ``preventatively'', suppressing the inflow of gas onto the galaxy. The histories of MrAGN galaxies are gas ejection-dominated, while the histories of NoAGN galaxies are gas recycling-dominated. This difference in gas cycles results in the quenching of star formation in MrAGN galaxies, while their NoAGN counterparts continue to form stars until z=0. Finally, we examine how this change in the baryon cycle affects the metal content of MrAGN galaxies relative to NoAGN galaxies and find that a combination of gas removal from and metal injection into the hot gas halo results in higher average halo metallicities in MrAGN galaxies.