1. |
- Arnadottir, Anna, et al.
(author)
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The Meridian S02E00 : The Winter Solstice special episode
- 2021
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Artistic work (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In this very special solstice episode of The Meridian Nic and Rebecca look back at some of the highlights of 2021. With the days growing ever longer here in the Northern Hemisphere they have rallied a troupe of PhD students to compete in the 2021 Astronomy Games! Nic is joined by Alvaro and Johan on his team and Rebecca has convinced Daniel and Madeleine to join her team. The Games were recorded in front of a live studio audience.
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2. |
- Kraljic, Katarina, et al.
(author)
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Emergence and cosmic evolution of the Kennicutt- Schmidt relation driven by interstellar turbulence
- 2024
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In: Astronomy and Astrophysics. - 0004-6361. ; 682
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The scaling relations between the gas content and star formation rate of galaxies provide useful insights into the processes governing their formation and evolution. We investigated the emergence and the physical drivers of the global Kennicutt-Schmidt (KS) relation at 0:25 ≤ z ≤ 4 in the cosmological hydrodynamic simulation NewHorizon, capturing the evolution of a few hundred galaxies with a resolution down to 34 pc. The details of this relation vary strongly with the stellar mass of galaxies and the redshift. A power-law relation ΣSFR / Σa gas with a ≈ 1:4, like that found empirically, emerges at z ≈ 2..3 for the more massive half of the galaxy population. However, no such convergence is found in the lower-mass galaxies, for which the relation gets shallower with decreasing redshift. At galactic scales, the star formation activity correlates with the level of turbulence of the interstellar medium, quantified by the Mach number, rather than with the gas fraction (neutral or molecular), confirming the conclusions found in previous works. With decreasing redshift, the number of outliers with short depletion times diminishes, reducing the scatter of the KS relation, while the overall population of galaxies shifts toward low densities. Our results, from parsec-scale star formation models calibrated with local Universe physics, demonstrate that the cosmological evolution of the environmental (e.g., mergers) and internal conditions (e.g., gas fractions) conspire to shape the KS relation. This is an illustration of how the interplay of global and local processes leaves a detectable imprint on galactic-scale observables and scaling relations.
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3. |
- Prgomet, Mateo, et al.
(author)
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EDGE : The sensitivity of ultra-faint dwarfs to a metallicity-dependent initial mass function
- 2022
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In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0035-8711 .- 1365-2966. ; 513:2, s. 2326-2334
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Motivated by the observed bottom-light initial mass function (IMF) in faint dwarfs, we study how a metallicity-dependent IMF affects the feedback budget and observables of an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy. We model the evolution of a low-mass 8 × 108 M⊙) dark matter halo with cosmological, zoomed hydrodynamical simulations capable of resolving individual supernovae explosions, which we complement with an empirically motivated subgrid prescription for systematic IMF variations. In this framework, at the low gas metallicities typical of faint dwarfs, the IMF of newborn stellar populations becomes top-heavy, increasing the efficiency of supernova and photoionization feedback in regulating star formation. This results in a 100-fold reduction of the final stellar mass of the dwarf compared to a canonical IMF, at fixed dynamical mass. The increase in the feedback budget is none the less met by increased metal production from more numerous massive stars, leading to nearly constant iron content at z = 0. A metallicity-dependent IMF therefore provides a mechanism to produce low-mass (M* ∼ 103 M⊙), yet enriched ([Fe/H] -2) field dwarf galaxies, thus opening a self-consistent avenue to populate the plateau in [Fe/H] at the faintest end of the mass-metallicity relation.
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