Ram pressure stripping of halo gas in disk galaxies: Implications on galactic star formation in different environments

TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations to analyze how ram pressure stripping affects halo gas in disk galaxies across different environments, revealing significant gas loss and implications for star formation suppression.

Contribution

It provides a detailed, self-consistent simulation of ram pressure effects on halo and disk gas, highlighting dependencies on environment and galaxy properties, and proposing an outside-in star formation truncation mechanism.

Findings

60-80% of halo gas can be stripped in clusters with M_host 10^{14} M_sun

F_strip increases with larger M_host and smaller M_gal

Ram pressure stripping is effective even in small groups under certain conditions

Abstract

We numerically investigate evolution of gaseous halos around disk galaxies in different environments ranging from small groups to rich clusters in order to understand galaxy evolution in these environments. Our simulations self-consistently incorporate effects of ram pressure of intergalactic medium (IGM) on disk and halo gas of galaxies and hydrodynamical interaction between disk and halo gas so that mass fractions of halos gas stripped by ram pressure of IGM (F_strip) can be better estimated. We mainly investigate how F_strip depends on total masses of their host environments (M_host}), galactic masses (M_gal), densities and temperature of IGM (T_IGM and rho_IGM, respectively), relative velocities between IGM and galaxies (V_r), and physical properties of disks (e.g., gas mass fraction). We find that typically 60-80% of halo gas can be efficiently stripped from Milky Way-type disk galaxies by ram pressure in clusters with M_host 10^{14} M_sun We also find that F_strip depends on M_host such that F_strip is higher for larger M_host. Furthermore it is found that F_strip can be higher in disk galaxies with smaller M_gal for a given environment. Our simulations demonstrate that the presence of disk gas can suppress ram pressure stripping of halo gas owing to hydrodynamical interaction between halo and disk gas. Ram pressure stripping of halo gas is found to be efficient (i.e., F_strip>0.5) even in small and/or compact groups, if rho_IGM ~ 10^5 M_sun/kpc^3 and V_r ~ 400 km/s. Based on the derived radial distributions of remaining halo gas after ram pressure stripping, we propose that truncation of star formation after halo gas stripping can occur outside-in in disk galaxies.