Cosmological formation and chemical evolution of an elliptical galaxy

TL;DR

This study investigates how a cosmologically derived gas infall law affects the formation and chemical evolution of elliptical galaxies, revealing discrepancies with observed chemical abundance ratios and star formation rates.

Contribution

It introduces a cosmologically motivated infall law into elliptical galaxy models and compares the results with previous empirical models and observations.

Findings

Models without galactic winds overpredict SNIa and SNII rates.

Cosmological infall law leads to low [Mg/Fe] ratios inconsistent with observations.

The slow gas accretion in the model conflicts with observed chemical constraints.

Abstract

We aim at studying the effect of a cosmologically motivated gas infall law for the formation of a massive elliptical galaxy in order to understand its impact on the formation of the spheroids. We replace the empirical infall law of the model by Pipino & Matteucci with a cosmologically derived infall law for the formation of an elliptical galaxy. We constrast our predictions with observations. We also compare the obtained results with those of Pipino & Matteucci. We computed models with and without galactic winds: we found that models without wind predict a too large current SNIa rate. In particular, the cosmological model produces a current SNIa which is about ten times higher than the observed values. Moreover models without wind predict a large current SNII rate, too large even if compared with the recent GALEX data. The predicted SNII rate for the model with wind, on the other hand, is too low if compared with the star formation histories given by GALEX. Last but not least, the mean value for the [Mg/Fe] ratio in the dominant stellar population of the simulated galaxy, as predicted by the cosmological model, is too low if compared to observations. This is, a very important result indicating that the cosmological infall law is in contrast with the chemical evolution. A cosmologically derived infall law for an elliptical galaxy cannot reproduce all the chemical constraints given by the observations. The problem resides in the fact that the cosmologically derived infall law implies a slow gas accretion with consequent star formation rate active for a long period. In this situation low [Mg/Fe] ratios are produced for the dominant stellar population in a typical elliptical, at variance with observations.