Local positive feedback in the overall negative: the impact of quasar winds on star formation in the FIRE cosmological simulations
Creators
-
1.
University of Connecticut
- 2. Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute, 162 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
-
3.
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
-
4.
Columbia University
-
5.
Wesleyan University
-
6.
Northwestern University
-
7.
University of Hull
-
8.
Pomona College
-
9.
Harvard University
-
10.
California Institute of Technology
-
11.
Princeton University
-
12.
University of California, San Diego
Abstract
Negative feedback from accreting supermassive black holes is considered crucial in suppressing star formation and quenching massive galaxies. However, several models and observations suggest that black hole feedback may have a positive effect, triggering star formation by compressing interstellar medium gas to higher densities. We investigate the dual role of black hole feedback using cosmological hydrodynamic simulations from the Feedback In Realistic Environment (FIRE) project, incorporating a novel implementation of hyper-refined accretion-disc winds. Focusing on a massive, star-forming galaxy at z ∼ 2 (M_(halo) ~ 10^(12.5) M⊙), we demonstrate that strong quasar winds with a kinetic power of ∼10⁴⁶ erg s⁻¹, persisting for over 20 Myr, drive the formation of a central gas cavity and significantly reduce the surface density of star formation across the galaxy's disc. The suppression of star formation primarily occurs by limiting the availability of gas for star formation rather than by evacuating the pre-existing star-forming gas reservoir (preventive feedback dominates over ejective feedback). Despite the overall negative impact of quasar winds, we identify several potential indicators of local positive feedback, including (1) the spatial anticorrelation between wind-dominated regions and star-forming clumps, (2) higher local star formation efficiency in compressed gas at the edge of the cavity, and (3) increased contribution of outflowing material to local star formation. Moreover, stars formed under the influence of quasar winds tend to be located at larger radial distances. Our findings suggest that both positive and negative AGN feedback can coexist within galaxies, although the local positive triggering of star formation has a minor influence on global galaxy growth.
Copyright and License
Acknowledgement
We thank the anonymous referee for constructive comments that helped improve the paper. The simulations were run on Flatiron Institute’s research computing facilities (Gordon-Simons, Popeye, and Iron compute clusters), supported by the Simons Foundation. We thank the Scientific Computing Core group at the Flatiron Institute for outstanding support. Additional numerical calculations were run on the Caltech compute cluster ‘Wheeler,’ allocations FTA-Hopkins supported by the NSF and TACC, and NASA HEC SMD-16-7592, and XSEDE allocation TG-AST160048 supported by NSF grant ACI-1053575. JMF was supported in part by a NASA CT Space Grant Graduate Fellowship. DAA acknowledges support by NSF grants AST-2009687 and AST-2108944, CXO grant TM2-23006X, Simons Foundation Award CCA-1018464, and Cottrell Scholar Award CS-CSA-2023-028 by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. SW was supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST2001905. CAFG was supported by NSF through grants AST-1715216, AST-2108230, and CAREER award AST-1652522; by NASA through grants 17-ATP17-006 7 and 21-ATP21-0036; by STScI through grants HST-AR-16124.001-A and HST-GO-16730.016-A; by CXO through grant TM2-23005X; and by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement through a Cottrell Scholar Award. JM is funded by the Hirsch Foundation. KS acknowledges support from the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, which is funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and support from Simons Foundation.
Data Availability
The data supporting the plots within this article are available on reasonable request to the corresponding author. FIRE-2 simulations are publicly available (Wetzel et al. 2023) at http://flathub.flatironinstitute.org/fire. Additional FIRE simulation data, including initial conditions and derived data products, are available at https://fire.northwestern.edu/data/. A public version of the gizmo code is available at http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~phopkins/Site/GIZMO.html.
Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2301.01784 (arXiv)
Funding
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- HEC SMD-16-7592
- National Science Foundation
- TG-AST160048
- National Science Foundation
- ACI-1053575
- National Science Foundation
- AST-2009687
- National Science Foundation
- AST-2108944
- National Science Foundation
- TM2-23006X
- Simons Foundation
- CCA-1018464
- Research Corporation for Science Advancement
- Cottrell Scholar CS-CSA-2023-028
- National Science Foundation
- AST2001905
- National Science Foundation
- AST-1715216
- National Science Foundation
- AST-2108230
- National Science Foundation
- AST-1652522
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 17-ATP17-0067
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 21-ATP21-0036
- Space Telescope Science Institute
- HST-AR-16124.001-A
- Space Telescope Science Institute
- HST-GO-16730.016-A
- Space Telescope Science Institute
- TM2-23005X
Dates
- Submitted
-
2023-01-05
- Accepted
-
2023-07-07
- Available
-
2023-07-13Published
- Available
-
2023-07-24Corrected and typeset
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- Astronomy Department , TAPIR , Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics , Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
- Publication Status
- Published