Formation of late-type spiral galaxies: gas return from stellar populations regulates disk destruction and bulge growth

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that continuous gas return from stellar populations plays a crucial role in regulating disk preservation and bulge growth in spiral galaxies, aligning cosmological models with observed galaxy structures.

Contribution

It introduces the idea that long-term stellar mass loss significantly influences galaxy structural evolution, improving the match between simulations and observed late-type spiral galaxies.

Findings

Gas recycling can reduce bulge-to-disk ratio by a factor of 3.

Stellar mass loss supports disk growth and survival during mergers.

Cosmological models can produce realistic spiral galaxies with this mechanism.

Abstract

Spiral galaxies have most of their stellar mass in a large rotating disk, and only a modest fraction in a central spheroidal bulge. This poses a major challenge for cosmological models of galaxy formation. Galaxies form at the centre of dark matter halos through a combination of hierarchical merging and gas accretion along cold streams, and should rapidly grow their bulge through mergers and instabilities. Cosmological simulations predict galaxies to have most of their mass in the central bulge, and therefore an angular momentum much below the observed level, except in dwarf galaxies. We propose that the continuous return of fresh gas by stellar populations over cosmic times could solve this issue. A population of stars formed at a given instant typically returns half of its initial mass in the form of gas over 10 billion years, and the process is not dominated by rapid supernovae explosions but by the long-term mass-loss from low- and intermediate-mass stars. Using simulations of galaxy formation, we show that this recycling of gas can strongly affect the structural evolution of massive galaxies, potentially solving the bulge fraction issue: we find that the bulge-to-disk ratio of a massive galaxy can be divided by a factor of 3. The continuous recycling of baryons through star formation and stellar mass loss helps the growth of disks and their survival to interactions and mergers. Instead of forming only early-type, spheroid-dominated galaxies (S0 and ellipticals), the standard cosmological model can then successfully account for massive late-type, disk-dominated spiral galaxies (Sb-Sc).