Wind-Driven Gas Networks and Star Formation in Galaxies: Reaction-Advection Hydrodynamic Simulations

Abstract

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 interacting shell fragments whose overall appearance is a web of filaments (in two dimensions). A new star cluster is formed whenever the column density through a filament exceeds a critical threshold based on the gravitational instability criterion for an expanding shell, which then generates a new expanding shell after some time delay. A filament- finding algorithm is developed to locate the potential sites of new star formation. The major result is the dominance of multiple interactions between advectively-distorted shells in controlling the gas and star morphology, gas velocity distribution and mass spectrum of high mass density peaks, and the global star formation history. The gas morphology observations of gas in the LMC and in local molecular clouds. The frequency distribution of present-to-past average global star formation rate, the distribution of gas velocities in filaments (found to be exponential), and the cloud mass spectra (estimated using a structure tree method), are discussed in detail.

40 pp, 15 eps figs, mnras style, accepted for publication in MNRAS, abstract abridged, revisions in response to referee's comments

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• The Ionized Gas in Local Starburst Galaxies: Global and Small--Scale Feedback from Star Formation
• High Resolution LAsMA ${}^{12}$CO and ${}^{13}$CO Observation of the G305 Giant Molecular Cloud Complex : I. Feedback on the Molecular Gas
• Probing Turbulence with Infrared Observations in OMC1
• The large- and small-scale CaII K structure of the Milky Way from observations of Galactic and Magellanic sightlines
• A pilot method to determine the high mass end of the Stellar Initial Mass Function in galaxies using UVIT, H$\alpha$-MUSE observations and applied to NGC628