Photoionizing feedback in spiral arm molecular clouds

Bending, Thomas; Dobbs, Clare; Bate, Matthew R.

doi:10.1093/mnras/staa1293

Cited by 29 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 88 publications

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“…We use the smoothed particle hydrodynamics code NG, which originated with Benz et al (1990) and Benz (1990), and was substantially modified by Bate et al (1995) and Price & Monaghan (2007). Full details of the initial conditions and cluster-sink particle setup can be found in Bending et al (2020) -we provide a summary here.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This evolved for about 300 Myr with a mass resolution of 312.5 M per particle, and included self-gravity, ISM heating/cooling, H 2 and CO chemistry, and injections of energy representing supernova events (Dobbs et al 2011). Bending et al (2020) extracted a section of a spiral arm with dimensions ∼ 500 × 500 × 100 pc and mass 4 × 10 6 M (named 'SR' in that paper). They also enhanced the resolution to 1 M per particle, permitting the creation of cluster-sink particles for tracking star formation.…”

Section: Initial Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The massive star is taken from a pre-sampled Kroupa (2001) initial mass function (IMF). The ordering of stars used in this paper is the same as the models of Bending et al (2020). See also Sormani et al 2017 andGeen et al 2018 for similar clustersink implementations.…”

Section: Cluster-sink Particlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Photoionizing feedback has been included in many 3D numerical studies of GMCs over the last decade (e.g. Dale et al 2005;Mellema et al 2006;Peters et al 2010;Arthur et al 2011;Walch et al 2012;Colín et al 2013;Geen et al 2015;Howard et al 2016;Gavagnin et al 2017;Ali et al 2018;Kim et al 2018;Zamora-Avilés et al 2019;Vandenbroucke & Wood 2019;Bending et al 2020;Fukushima et al 2020;Sartorio et al 2021). However, fewer studies have focused on stellar winds (Dale & Bonnell 2008;Rogers & Pittard 2013;Rey-Raposo et al 2017;Offner & Liu 2018;Wareing et al 2018), particularly in combination with radiation (Dale et al 2014;Ngoumou et al 2015;Haid et al 2018;Geen et al 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Stellar winds and photoionization in a spiral arm

Ali,

Bending,

Dobbs

2022

Preprint

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The role of different stellar feedback mechanisms in giant molecular clouds is not well understood. This is especially true for regions with many interacting clouds as would be found in a galactic spiral arm. In this paper, building on previous work by Bending et al., we extract a 500 × 500 × 100 pc section of a spiral arm from a galaxy simulation. We use smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) to re-simulate the region at higher resolution (1 M per particle). We present a method for momentumdriven stellar winds from main sequence massive stars, and include this with photoionization, self-gravity, a galactic potential, and ISM heating/cooling. We also include cluster-sink particles with accretion radii of 0.78 pc to track star/cluster formation. The feedback methods are as robust as previous models on individual cloud scales (e.g. Dale et al.). We find that photoionization dominates the disruption of the spiral arm section, with stellar winds only producing small cavities (at most ∼ 30 pc). Stellar winds do not affect the resulting cloud statistics or the integrated star formation rate/efficiency, unlike ionization, which produces more stars, and more clouds of higher density and higher velocity dispersion compared to the control run without feedback. Winds do affect the sink properties, distributing star formation over more low-mass sinks (∼10 2 M ) and producing fewer high-mass sinks (∼10 3 M ). Overall, stellar winds play at best a secondary role compared to photoionization, and on many measures, they have a negligible impact.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Initial Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Cluster-sink Particlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Stellar winds and photoionization in a spiral arm

Ali,

Bending,

Dobbs

2022

Preprint

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“…The age range observed for the clusters within the H ii regions is in agreement with studies of YSCs in local galaxies (Whitmore et al 2011;Hollyhead et al 2015;Hannon et al 2019;Grasha et al 2019), that find that clusters emerge from their natal gas in <4−5 Myr, but that the process can start as early as 2−3 Myr. Also simulations of cluster formation including solely the effect of photoionisation and stellar winds (Dale et al 2014;Bending et al 2020), have shown that within 3 Myr, and before the onset of SN, several clusters have vacated some channels with low gas density. These channels are easily ionised; therefore ionising radiation can escape from the H ii regions even if star formation is still taking place.…”

Section: Yscs Age Mass and Ionising Flux Distributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying the ISM at ∼10 pc scale in NGC 7793 with MUSE

Bruna

Adamo

Boquien

et al. 2021

A&A

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Context. Feedback from massive stars affects the interstellar medium (ISM) from the immediate surroundings of the stars (parsec scales) to galactic (kiloparsec) scales. High-spatial resolution studies of H II regions are critical to investigate how this mechanism operates. Aims. We study the ionised ISM in NGC 7793 with the MUSE instrument at ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), over a field of view (FoV) of ∼2 kpc2 and at a spatial resolution of ∼10 pc. The aim is to link the physical conditions of the ionised gas (reddening, ionisation status, abundance measurements) within the spatially resolved H II regions to the properties of the stellar populations producing Lyman continuum photons. Methods. The analysis of the MUSE dataset, which provides a map of the ionised gas and a census of Wolf Rayet stars, is complemented with a sample of young star clusters (YSCs) and O star candidates observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and of giant molecular clouds traced in CO(2–1) emission with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). We estimated the oxygen abundance using a temperature-independent strong-line method. We determined the observed total amount of ionising photons (Q(H0)) from the extinction corrected Hα luminosity. This estimate was then compared to the expected Q(H0) obtained by summing the contributions of YSCs and massive stars. The ratio of the two values gives an estimate for the escape fraction (fesc) of photons in the region of interest. We used the [S II]/[O III] ratio as a proxy for the optical depth of the gas and classified H II regions into ionisation bounded, or as featuring channels of optically thin gas. We compared the resulting ionisation structure with the computed fesc. We also investigated the dependence of fesc on the age spanned by the stellar population in each region. Results. We find a median oxygen abundance of 12 + log(O/H) ∼ 8.37, with a scatter of 0.25 dex, which is in agreement with previous estimates for our target. We furthermore observe that the abundance map of H II regions is rich in substructures, surrounding clusters and massive stars, although clear degeneracies with photoionisation are also observed. From the population synthesis analysis, we find that YSCs located in H II regions have a higher probability of being younger and less massive as well as of emitting a higher number of ionising photons than clusters in the rest of the field. Overall, we find fesc,HII = 0.67−0.12+0.08 for the population of H II regions. We also conclude that the sources of ionisation observed within the FoV are more than sufficient to explain the amount of diffuse ionised gas (DIG) observed in this region of the galaxy. We do not observe a systematic trend between the visual appearance of H II regions and fesc, pointing to the effect of 3D geometry in the small sample probed.

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Simulating star formation in spiral galaxies

et al. 2020

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We present Ekster, a new method for simulating the formation and dynamics of individual stars in a relatively low-resolution gas background. Here, we use Ekster to simulate star cluster formation in two different regions from each of two galaxy models with different spiral potentials. We simulate these regions for 3 Myr to study where and how star clusters form. We find that massive GMC regions form more massive clusters than sections of spiral arms. Additionally we find that clusters form both by accreting gas and by merging with other proto-clusters, the latter happening more frequently in the denser GMC regions.

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Photoionizing feedback in spiral arm molecular clouds

Cited by 29 publications

References 88 publications

Stellar winds and photoionization in a spiral arm

Stellar winds and photoionization in a spiral arm

Studying the ISM at ∼10 pc scale in NGC 7793 with MUSE

Simulating star formation in spiral galaxies

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