Radiative Turbulent Mixing Layers and the Survival of Magellanic Debris

Abstract

The Magellanic Stream is sculpted by its infall through the Milky Way's circumgalactic medium, but the rates and directions of mass, momentum, and energy exchange through the Stream-halo interface are relative unknowns critical for determining the origin and fate of the Stream. Complementary to large-scale simulations of LMC-SMC interactions, we apply new insights derived from idealized, high-resolution "cloud-crushing" and radiative turbulent mixing layer simulations to the Leading Arm and Trailing Stream. Contrary to classical expectations of fast cloud breakup, we predict that the Leading Arm and much of the Trailing Stream should be surviving infall and even gaining mass due to strong radiative cooling. Provided a sufficiently supersonic tidal swing-out from the Clouds, the present-day Leading Arm could be a series of high-density clumps in the cooling tail behind the progenitor cloud. We back up our analytic framework with a suite of converged wind-tunnel simulations, finding that previous results on cloud survival and mass growth can be extended to high Mach number ($\mathcal{M}$) flows with a modified drag time $t_{drag}\propto 1+\mathcal{M}$ and longer growth time. We also simulate the Trailing Stream; we find that the growth time is long ($\sim$ Gyrs) compared to the infall time, and approximate H$\alpha$ emission is low on average ($\sim$few mR) but can be up to tens of mR in bright spots. Our findings also have broader extragalactic implications for e.g. galactic winds, which we discuss.

arXiv commentAccepted to ApJ May 2022. Additional panels added to Figures 5, 6, and 9 to more clearly show cloud drag time and growth time scalings. Main conclusions unchanged

References in corpus (106)

• The chemical composition of the Sun
• A Multi-Code Analysis Toolkit for Astrophysical Simulation Data
• Radiative transfer in a clumpy universe: IV. New synthesis models of the cosmic UV/X-ray background
• Athena: A New Code for Astrophysical MHD
• The effect of photo-ionization on the cooling rates of enriched, astrophysical plasmas
• Are the Magellanic Clouds on their First Passage about the Milky Way?
• Beasts of the Southern Wild: Discovery of nine Ultra Faint satellites in the vicinity of the Magellanic Clouds
• Gaseous Galaxy Halos
• Third-Epoch Magellanic Cloud Proper Motions I: HST/WFC3 data and Orbit Implications
• Cool Outflows in Galaxies and their Implications
• GASS: The Parkes Galactic All-Sky Survey. I. Survey Description, Goals, and Initial Data Release
• The Role of Dwarf Galaxy Interactions in Shaping the Magellanic System and Implications for Magellanic Irregulars
• The growth and entrainment of cold gas in a hot wind
• The Origin of the Magellanic Stream and Its Leading Arm
• The disruption of nearby galaxies by the Milky Way
• A Characteristic Scale for Cold Gas
• Constraining the Milky Way's Hot Gas Halo with OVII and OVII Emission Lines
• Figuring Out Gas & Galaxies in Enzo (FOGGIE). I. Resolving Simulated Circumgalactic Absorption at 2 < z < 2.5
• The Parkes HI Survey of the Magellanic System
• Probing Galactic Halos with Fast Radio Bursts
• Cosmological simulations of the circumgalactic medium with 1 kpc resolution: enhanced HI column densities
• Magnetized Gas Clouds can Survive Acceleration by a Hot Wind
• The Launching of Cold Clouds by Galaxy Outflows I: Hydrodynamic Interactions with Radiative Cooling
• The Origin of the Magellanic Stream
• The Impact of Enhanced Halo Resolution on the Simulated Circumgalactic Medium
• Resolving small-scale cold circumgalactic gas in TNG50
• Small Dwarf Galaxies Within Larger Dwarfs: Why Some Are Luminous While Most Go Dark
• The Orbital Histories of Magellanic Satellites Using Gaia DR2 Proper Motions
• Multi-phase High-Velocity Clouds toward HE 0226-4110 and PG 0953+414
• The 200 Degree-Long Magellanic Stream System
• The Magellanic Stream: Circumnavigating the Galaxy
• Gravity-driven Lyman-alpha blobs from cold streams into galaxies
• How cold gas continuously entrains mass and momentum from a hot wind
• Multiphase Gas and the Fractal Nature of Radiative Turbulent Mixing Layers
• A Solution Accurate, Efficient and Stable Unsplit Staggered Mesh Scheme for Three Dimensional Magnetohydrodynamics
• The COS/UVES Absorption Survey of the Magellanic Stream. III: Ionization, Total Mass, and Inflow Rate onto the Milky Way
• The survival of gas clouds in the Circumgalactic Medium of Milky Way-like galaxies
• The Physical Nature of Starburst-Driven Galactic Outflows
• Ram Pressure Stripping of the Large Magellanic Cloud's Disk as a Probe of the Milky Way's Circumgalactic Medium
• N-body simulations of the Magellanic Stream
• The Extended Distribution of Baryons Around Galaxies
• Detection of H-alpha emission from the Magellanic Stream: evidence for an extended gaseous Galactic halo
• Interaction of a cold cloud with a hot wind: the regimes of cloud growth and destruction and the impact of magnetic fields
• An Exact Integration Scheme for Radiative Cooling in Hydrodynamical Simulations
• The Source of Ionization along the Magellanic Stream
• The Launching of Cold Clouds by Galaxy Outflows II: The Role of Thermal Conduction
• On the Survival of Cool Clouds in the Circum-Galactic Medium
• Entrainment in Trouble: Cool Cloud Acceleration and Destruction in Hot Supernova-Driven Galactic Winds
• Simulations of radiative turbulent mixing layers
• Survival and mass growth of cold gas in a turbulent, multiphase medium
• An Ultra-Faint Galaxy Candidate Discovered in Early Data from the Magellanic Satellites Survey
• Trident: a universal tool for generating synthetic absorption spectra from astrophysical simulations
• The Impact of Cosmic Rays on Thermal Instability in the Circumgalactic Medium
• Instability of Supersonic Cold Streams Feeding Galaxies IV: Survival of Radiatively Cooling Streams
• Radiative Mixing Layers: Insights from Turbulent Combustion
• The Magellanic Stream System: I. Ram-pressure tails and the relics of the collision between the Magellanic Clouds
• Fossil imprint of a powerful flare at the Galactic Centre along the Magellanic Stream
• Growth and structure of multiphase gas in the cloud-crushing problem with cooling
• The COS/UVES Absorption Survey of the Magellanic Stream: II. Evidence for a complex enrichment history of the Stream from the Fairall 9 sightline
• The COS/UVES Absorption Survey of the Magellanic Stream: I. One-Tenth Solar Abundances along the Body of the Stream
• Reproducing properties of MW dSphs as descendants of DM-free TDGs
• Is Multiphase Gas Cloudy or Misty?
• Massive Warm/Hot Galaxy Coronae: II. Isentropic Model
• The small-scale structure of the Magellanic Stream
• The large-scale ionization cones in the Galaxy
• It's Cloud's Illusions I Recall: Mixing Drives the Acceleration of Clouds from Ram Pressure Stripped Galaxies
• The many streams of the Magellanic Stream
• The Magellanic Corona and the formation of the Magellanic Stream
• The Magellanic Stream at 20 kpc: A New Orbital History for the Magellanic Clouds
• Toward a Complete Understanding of the Magellanic Stream Formation
• Instability of Supersonic Cold Streams Feeding Galaxies III: Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability in Three Dimensions
• Models of Tidally Induced Gas Filaments in the Magellanic Stream
• The Survival of Multiphase Dusty Clouds in Hot Winds
• A simple model for mixing and cooling in cloud-wind interactions
• An Interaction of a Magellanic Leading Arm High Velocity Cloud with the Milky Way Disk
• Head-Tail Clouds: Drops to Probe the Diffuse Galactic Halo
• Shock-multicloud interactions in galactic outflows -- II. Radiative fractal clouds and cold gas thermodynamics
• Measurement of a Magnetic Field in a Leading Arm High Velocity Cloud
• The Efficiency of Magnetic Field Amplification at Shocks by Turbulence
• Instability of Supersonic Cold Streams Feeding Galaxies II. Nonlinear Evolution of Surface and Body Modes of Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability
• The Magellanic Stream: break up and accretion onto the hot Galactic corona
• The aftermath of the Great Collision between our Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Ly$\alpha$ Blobs from Cold Streams Undergoing Kelvin-Helmholtz Instabilities
• Cosmic Ray Driven Outflows from the Large Magellanic Cloud: Contributions to the LMC Filament
• The Magellanic System: the puzzle of the leading gas stream
• Chemical Abundances in the Leading Arm of the Magellanic Stream
• The four leading arms of the Magellanic Cloud system
• Satellites of Satellites: The Case for Carina and Fornax
• Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability in Self-Gravitating Streams
• A New Model For Including Galactic Winds in Simulations of Galaxy Formation I: Introducing the Physically Evolved Winds (PhEW) Model
• The Magellanic Stream and Debris Clouds
• Thermal Instabilities and Shattering in the High-Redshift WHIM: Convergence Criteria and Implications for Low-Metallicity Strong HI Absorbers
• A Model for Line Absorption and Emission from Turbulent Mixing Layers
• Revealing the Ionization Properties of the Magellanic Stream using Optical Emission
• GASS High Velocity Clouds in the Region of the Magellanic Leading Arm
• Kinematics of the Magellanic Stream and Implications for its Ionization
• The Fate of Supernova-Heated Gas in Star-Forming Regions of the LMC: Lessons for Galaxy Formation?
• New constraints on the nature and origin of the Leading Arm of the Magellanic Stream
• Simulating Gas Inflow at the Disk-Halo Interface
• A comparison of shock-cloud and wind-cloud interactions: The longer survival of clouds in winds
• A comparison of shock-cloud and wind-cloud interactions: effect of increased cloud density contrast on cloud evolution
• Constraining density and metallicity of the Milky Way's hot gas halo from O VII spectra and ram-pressure stripping
• Probing the Structure and Kinematics of the transition Layer between the Magellanic Stream and the Halo in HI
• H$\alpha$ Distances to the Leading Arm of the Magellanic Stream
• The Distance and Properties of Hydrogen Clouds in the Leading Arm of the Magellanic System
• The Evolution of Magellanic-like Galaxy Pairs and The Production of Magellanic Stream Analogues in Simulations with Tides, Ram Pressure, and Stellar Feedback

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Cloudy with A Chance of Rain: Accretion Braking of Cold Clouds
• Cooling driven coagulation
• Simulations of Weakly Magnetized Turbulent Mixing Layers
• Strength in numbers: A multiphase wind model with multiple cloud populations
• Following the tidal trail: a history of modeling the Magellanic Stream
• Introducing the Descriptive Parametric Model: Gaseous Profiles for Galaxies, Groups, and Clusters
• Simulating High-Velocity Clouds in the Observational Plane: An Initial Study with the Smith Cloud