Including star formation and supernova feedback within cosmological simulations of galaxy formation

Abstract

We investigate phenomenological models of star formation and supernova feedback in N-body/SPH simulations of galaxy formation. First, we compare different prescriptions in the literature for turning cold gas into stars neglecting feedback effects. We find that most prescriptions give broadly similar results: the ratio of cold gas to stars in the final galaxies is primarily controlled by the range of gas densities where star formation is allowed to proceed efficiently. In the absence of feedback, the fraction of gas that cools is much too high, resulting, for example, in a K-band luminosity function that is much brighter than observed. This problem is ameliorated by including a feedback model which either imparts radial kinetic perturbations to galactic gas or directly reheats such material and prevents it from cooling for a certain period of time. In both these models, a significant fraction of cold gas is heated and expelled from haloes with an efficiency that varies inversely with halo circular velocity. Increasing the resolution of a simulation allows a wider dynamic range in mass to be followed, but the average properties of the resolved galaxy population remain largely unaffected. However, as the resolution is increased, more and more gas is reheated by small galaxies; our results suggest that convergence requires the full mass range of galaxies to be resolved.