Precipitation-Regulated Star Formation in Galaxies

Abstract

Galaxy growth depends critically on the interplay between radiative cooling of cosmic gas and the resulting energetic feedback that cooling triggers. This interplay has proven exceedingly difficult to model, even with large supercomputer simulations, because of its complexity. Nevertheless, real galaxies are observed to obey simple scaling relations among their primary observable characteristics. Here we show that a generic emergent property of the interplay between cooling and feedback can explain the observed scaling relationships between a galaxy's stellar mass, its total mass, and its chemical enrichment level, as well as the relationship between the average orbital velocity of its stars and the mass of its central black hole. These relationships naturally result from any feedback mechanism that strongly heats a galaxy's circumgalactic gas in response to precipitation of colder clouds out of that gas, because feedback then suspends the gas in a marginally precipitating state.

Submitted to ApJ Letters

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• Star Formation Activity in CLASH Brightest Cluster Galaxies
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• Jet-driven AGN feedback on molecular gas and low star-formation efficiency in a massive local spiral galaxy with bright X-ray halo
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• Probing multiphase gas in local massive elliptical galaxies via multiwavelength observations
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• Constraints on precipitation-limited hot halos from massive galaxies to galaxy clusters
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• Zooming in on the Circumgalactic Medium with GIBLE: Tracing the Origin and Evolution of Cold Clouds
• The Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space (GLASS). XII. Spatially Resolved Galaxy Star Formation Histories and True Evolutionary Paths at z > 1
• Interpreting Observations of Absorption Lines in the Circumgalactic Medium with a Turbulent Medium
• Seeking Self-Regulating Simulations of Idealized Milky Way-Like Galaxies
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