Any way the wind blows: quantifying superbubbles and their outflows in simulated galaxies across z ≈ 0-3

Creators: Porter, Lori E.¹; Orr, Matthew E.^{2, 3}; Burkhart, Blakesley^{2, 3}; Wetzel, Andrew⁴; Kereš, Dušan⁵; Faucher-Giguère, Claude-André⁶; Hopkins, Philip F.⁷

1. Columbia University
2. Flatiron Institute
3. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
4. University of California, Davis
5. University of California, San Diego
6. Northwestern University
7. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

We present an investigation of clustered stellar feedback in the form of superbubbles identified within eleven galaxies from the FIRE-2 (Feedback in Realistic Environments) cosmological zoom-in simulation suite, at both cosmic noon (1 < z < 3) and in the local Universe. We study the spatially-resolved multiphase outflows that these supernovae drive, comparing our findings with recent theory and observations. These simulations consist of five LMC-mass galaxies and six Milky Way-mass progenitors (with a minimum baryonic particle mass of m_(b.min) = 7100 M⊙). For all galaxies, we calculate the local and galaxy-averaged mass and energy loading factors from the identified outflows. We also characterize the multiphase morphology and properties of the identified superbubbles, including the 'shell' of cool (T < 10⁵ K) gas and break out of energetic hot (T > 10⁵ K) gas when the shell bursts. We find that these simulations, regardless of redshift, have mass-loading factors and momentum fluxes in the cool gas that largely agree with recent observations. Lastly, we also investigate how methodological choices in measuring outflows can affect loading factors for galactic winds.

Copyright and License

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Ulrich Steinwandel, Drummond Fielding, and the anonymous referee for useful conversations and comments that greatly improved the manuscript. We ran simulations using: XSEDE, supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) grant ACI-1548562; Blue Waters, supported by the NSF; Frontera allocations AST21010 and AST20016, supported by the NSF and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC); Pleiades, via the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) High-End Computing (HEC) program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center. LEP is thankful to the Flatiron Institute for continued financial support and resources. The Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation. BB is grateful for generous support by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. AW received support from NSF via CAREER award AST-2045928 and grant AST-2107772; NASA ATP grant 80NSSC20K0513. C-AF-G was supported by NSF through grants AST-2108230, AST-2307327, and CAREER award AST-1652522; by NASA through grants 17-ATP17-0067 and 21-ATP21-0036; and by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) through grants HST-GO-16730.016-A and JWST-AR-03252.001-A.

Data Availability

The data supporting the plots within this article are available on reasonable request to the corresponding author. A public version of the gizmo code is available at http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~phopkins/Site/GIZMO.html. Additional data including simulation snapshots, initial conditions, and derived data products are available at https://fire.northwestern.edu/data/. The FIRE-2 simulations are publicly available (Wetzel et al. 2023) at http://flathub.flatironinstitute.org/fire.

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