Speaker
Mr
Matthew Smith
(Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge)
Description
The accurate modelling of stellar feedback from massive stars to the interstellar medium (ISM) is of crucial importance for understanding galaxy formation. Failure to include these processes in hydrodynamic simulations leads to the catastrophic overproduction of stars relative to observations. Supernovae (SNe) and winds from massive stars are a major source of stellar feedback but correctly capturing the evolution of stellar-driven outflows requires a very high resolution. Typically, this problem is countered with the adoption of sub-grid recipes for feedback, injecting energy and/or momentum as well as mass and metals into the ISM. Such recipes can involve the simple thermal or kinetic injection of the canonical 10^51 ergs per SN into surrounding gas, delaying of cooling or a more complicated scheme where the correct energy and momentum is injected according to the stage of the SN blastwave resolved. Simulation results can be highly sensitive to the numerical details of the sub-grid recipe employed, thus questioning the accuracy and reliability of these models. We present a novel implementation of star formation and stellar feedback in the moving-mesh code AREPO and use it to study systematically the effectiveness of several feedback schemes commonly found in the literature. We carry out a variety of simulations of both isolated systems and cosmological 'zoom in' simulations to unpick the dependence of results on resolution and choice of sub-grid recipe with the aim of developing an accurate model of SN feedback and the ISM in general.
Primary author
Mr
Matthew Smith
(Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge)
Co-authors
Dr
Debora Sijacki
(Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge)
Dr
Sijing Shen
(Insitute of Astronomy, Cambridge)
