Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 477, Issue 2, Pages 1565-1590Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/sty674
Keywords
stars: formation; galaxies: active; galaxies: evolution; galaxies: formation; cosmology: theory
Categories
Funding
- Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship
- NASA ATP Grant [NNX14AH35G]
- NSF [1411920, 1455342, AST-1412836, AST-1517491, AST1412153]
- Caltech-Carnegie Fellowship through Moore Center for Theoretical Cosmology and Physics at Caltech
- NASA from STScI [HST-GO-14734]
- NASA [NNX15AB22G]
- Cottrell Scholar Award from Research Corporation for Science Advancement
- Simons Foundation
- Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) - NSF [TG-AST120025, TG-AST130039, TG-AST150080]
- NASA HEC Program through NAS Division at Ames Research Center
- NCCS at Goddard Space Flight Center
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [1412153] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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We study the implementation of mechanical feedback from supernovae (SNe) and stellar mass loss in galaxy simulations, within the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE) project. We present the FIRE-2 algorithm for coupling mechanical feedback, which can be applied to any hydrodynamics method (e.g. fixed-grid, moving-mesh, and mesh-less methods), and black hole as well as stellar feedback. This algorithm ensures manifest conservation of mass, energy, and momentum, and avoids imprinting 'preferred directions' on the ejecta. We show that it is critical to incorporate both momentum and thermal energy of mechanical ejecta in a self-consistent manner, accounting for SNe cooling radii when they are not resolved. Using idealized simulations of single SN explosions, we show that the FIRE-2 algorithm, independent of resolution, reproduces converged solutions in both energy and momentum. In contrast, common 'fully thermal' (energy-dump) or 'fully kinetic' (particle-kicking) schemes in the literature depend strongly on resolution: when applied at mass resolution greater than or similar to 100M(circle dot), they diverge by orders of magnitude from the converged solution. In galaxy-formation simulations, this divergence leads to orders-of-magnitude differences in galaxy properties, unless those models are adjusted in a resolution-dependent way. We show that all models that individually time-resolve SNe converge to the FIRE-2 solution at sufficiently high resolution (<100M(circle dot)). However, in both idealized single-SN simulations and cosmological galaxy-formation simulations, the FIRE-2 algorithm converges much faster than other sub-grid models without re-tuning parameters.
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