Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

Abstract:

We study how better resolving the cooling length of galactic outflows affect their energetics. We perform radiativehydrodynamical galaxy formation simulations of an isolated dwarf galaxy (M = 108 M) with the RAMSES-RTZ code, accounting for non-equilibrium cooling and chemistry coupled to radiative transfer. Our simulations reach a spatial resolution of 18 pc in the interstellar medium (ISM) using a traditional quasi-Lagrangian scheme. We further implement a new adaptive mesh refinement strategy to resolve the local gas cooling length, allowing us to gradually increase the resolution in the stellar-feedback-powered outflows, from ≥ 200 pc to 18 pc. The propagation of outflows into the inner circumgalactic medium is significantly modified by this additional resolution, but the ISM, star formation, and feedback remain by and large the same. With increasing resolution in the diffuse gas, the hot outflowing phase (T > 8 × 104 K) systematically reaches overall higher temperatures and stays hotter for longer as it propagates outwards. This leads to two-fold increases in the time-averaged mass and metal outflow loading factors away from the galaxy (r = 5 kpc), a five-fold increase in the average energy loading factor, and a ≈50 per cent increase in the number of sightlines with NO VI ≥ 1013 cm−2. Such a significant boost to the energetics of outflows without new feedback mechanisms or channels strongly motivates future studies quantifying the efficiency with which better-resolved multiphase outflows regulate galactic star formation in a cosmological context.

Abstract:

Galaxy peculiar velocities can be used to trace the growth of structure on cosmological scales. In the radial direction, peculiar velocities cause redshift space distortions, an established cosmological probe, and can be measured individually in the presence of an independent distance indicator. In the transverse direction, peculiar velocities cause proper motions. In this case, however, the proper motions are too small to detect on a galaxy-by-galaxy basis for any realistic experiment in the foreseeable future, but could be detected statistically in cross-correlation with other tracers of the density fluctuations. We forecast the sensitivity for a detection of transverse peculiar velocities through the cross-correlation of a proper motion survey, modelled after existing extragalactic samples measured by Gaia, and an overlaping galaxy survey. In particular, we consider a low-redshift galaxy sample, and a higher-redshift quasar sample. We find that, while the expected cosmological signal is below the expected statistical uncertainties from current data using cross-correlations, the sensitivity can improve fast with future experiments, and the threshold for detection may not be too far away in the future. Quantitatively, we find that the signal-to-noise ratio for detection is in the range , with most of the signal concentrated at low redshifts . If detected, this signal is sensitive to the product of the expansion and growth rates at late times, and thus would constitute an independent observable, sensitive to both background expansion and large-scale density fluctuations.

Abstract:

We present LimberJack.jl, a fully auto-differentiable code for cosmological analyses of 2 point auto- and cross-correlation measurements from galaxy clustering, CMB lensing and weak lensing data written in Julia. Using Julia’s auto-differentiation ecosystem, LimberJack.jl can obtain gradients for its outputs an order of magnitude faster than traditional finite difference methods. This makes LimberJack.jl greatly synergistic with gradient-based sampling methods, such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, capable of efficiently exploring parameter spaces with hundreds of dimensions. We first prove LimberJack.jl’s reliability by reanalysing the DES Y1 3×2-point data. We then showcase its capabilities by using a O(100) parameters Gaussian Process to reconstruct the cosmic growth from a combination of DES Y1 galaxy clustering and weak lensing data, eBOSS QSO’s, CMB lensing and redshift-space distortions. Our Gaussian process reconstruction of the growth factor is statistically consistent with the ΛCDM Planck 2018 prediction at all redshifts. Moreover, we show that the addition of RSD data is extremely beneficial to this type of analysis, reducing the uncertainty in the reconstructed growth factor by 20% on average across redshift. LimberJack.jl is a fully open-source project available on Julia’s general repository of packages and GitHub.

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.