Multiphase galaxy formation: high-velocity clouds and the missing baryon problem

Abstract

The standard treatment of cooling in Cold Dark Matter halos assumes that all of the gas within a ``cooling radius'' cools and contracts monolithically to fuel galaxy formation. Here we take into account the expectation that the hot gas in galactic halos is thermally unstable and prone to fragmentation during cooling and show that the implications are more far-reaching than previously expected: allowing multi-phase cooling fundamentally alters expectations about gas infall in halos and naturally explains the bright-end cutoff in the galaxy luminosity function. We argue that cooling should proceed via the formation of high-density, 10^4 K clouds, pressure-confined within a hot gas background. The background medium has a low density, and can survive as a stable corona with a long cooling time. The fraction of baryons contained in the residual hot core grows with halo mass because the cooling density increases, and this leads to an upper-mass limit in quiescent, non-merged galaxies of ~10^11 Msun. In this scenario, galaxy formation is fueled by the infall of pressure-supported clouds. For Milky-Way-size systems, clouds of mass ~ 5x10^6 Msun that formed or merged within the last several Gyrs should still exist as a residual population in the halo, with a total mass in clouds of ~ 2 x 10^10 Msun. The mass of the Milky Way galaxy is explained naturally in this model, and is a factor of two smaller than would result in the standard treatment without feedback. We expect clouds in galactic halos to be ~ 1 kpc in size and to extend ~150 kpc from galactic centers. The predicted properties of clouds match well the observed radial velocities, angular sizes, column densities, and velocity widths of High Velocity Clouds around our Galaxy. The clouds also explain high-ion absorption systems at z<1.