Resolving the Formation of Protogalaxies. II. Central Gravitational Collapse

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution simulations to explore the early stages of galaxy formation, focusing on gravitational collapse, turbulence, and angular momentum transport in primordial gas, revealing insights into central collapse dynamics.

Contribution

It presents detailed adaptive mesh refinement simulations of primordial galaxy collapse, highlighting turbulence and angular momentum transport mechanisms without star formation feedback.

Findings

Central regions contract rapidly with turbulence up to Mach 4

Only one fragmentation site occurs despite decreasing Jeans length

Angular momentum transport leads to multiple nested unstable fragments

Abstract

Numerous cosmological hydrodynamic studies have addressed the formation of galaxies. Here we choose to study the first stages of galaxy formation, including non-equilibrium atomic primordial gas cooling, gravity and hydrodynamics. Using initial conditions appropriate for the concordance cosmological model of structure formation, we perform two adaptive mesh refinement simulations of ~10^8 M_sun galaxies at high redshift. The calculations resolve the Jeans length at all times with more than 16 cells and capture over 14 orders of magnitude in length scales. In both cases, the dense, 10^5 solar mass, one parsec central regions are found to contract rapidly and have turbulent Mach numbers up to 4. Despite the ever decreasing Jeans length of the isothermal gas, we only find one site of fragmentation during the collapse. However, rotational secular bar instabilities transport angular momentum outwards in the central parsec as the gas continues to collapse and lead to multiple nested unstable fragments with decreasing masses down to sub-Jupiter mass scales. Although these numerical experiments neglect star formation and feedback, they clearly highlight the physics of turbulence in gravitationally collapsing gas. The angular momentum segregation seen in our calculations plays an important role in theories that form supermassive black holes from gaseous collapse.