Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 459, Issue 1, Pages 310-332Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw453
Keywords
methods: numerical; galaxies: formation; galaxies: high-redshift; intergalactic medium; quasars: absorption lines
Categories
Funding
- BIS National E-infrastructure capital grant [ST/K00042X/1]
- STFC capital grant [ST/H008519/1]
- STFC DiRAC Operations grant [ST/K003267/1]
- Durham University
- Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)
- European Research Council under the European Union [278594-GasAroundGalaxies]
- UK Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/F001166/1, ST/I000976/1]
- Belgian Science Policy Office [AP P7/08 CHARM]
- Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme
- STFC [ST/K00042X/1, ST/M007006/1, ST/I000976/1, ST/H008519/1, ST/I00162X/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/I000976/1, ST/I00162X/1, ST/M007006/1, ST/K00042X/1, ST/M000966/1, ST/H008519/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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We study the distribution and evolution of highly ionized intergalactic metals in the Evolution and Assembly of Galaxies and their Environment (EAGLE) cosmological, hydrodynamical simulations. EAGLE has been shown to reproduce a wide range of galaxy properties while its subgrid feedback was calibrated without considering gas properties. We compare the predictions for the column density distribution functions (CDDFs) and cosmic densities of Si IV, CIV, NV, OVI and Ne VIII absorbers with observations at redshift z = 0 to similar to 6 and find reasonable agreement, although there are some differences. We show that the typical physical densities of the absorbing gas increase with column density and redshift, but decrease with the ionization energy of the absorbing ion. The typical metallicity increases with both column density and time. The fraction of collisionally ionized metal absorbers increases with time and ionization energy. While our results show little sensitivity to the presence or absence of AGN feedback, increasing/decreasing the efficiency of stellar feedback by a factor of 2 substantially decreases/increases the CDDFs and the cosmic densities of the metal ions. We show that the impact of the efficiency of stellar feedback on the CDDFs and cosmic densities is largely due to its effect on the metal production rate. However, the temperatures of the metal absorbers, particularly those of strong OVI, are directly sensitive to the strength of the feedback.
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