Balancing the Baryon Budget: The fraction of the IGM due to Galaxy Mergers

TL;DR

This paper estimates the fraction of baryonic gas released into the intergalactic medium due to galaxy mergers, finding that mergers can unbind up to 25% of halo gas, but other processes likely contribute to the observed baryon budget.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-analytic method to quantify gas loss from haloes during galaxy mergers, highlighting the role of mergers in baryon distribution.

Findings

Up to 25% of halo gas can be unbound by mergers.

Larger haloes release more gas than smaller ones.

Multi-phase gas accretion reduces unbound gas to a few percent.

Abstract

Observations indicate that roughly 60% of the baryons may exist in a Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM) at low redshifts. Following up on previous results showing that gas is released through galaxy mergers, we use a semi-analytic technique to estimate the fraction of gas mass lost from haloes solely due to mergers. We find that up to ~25% of the gas in a halo can unbind over the course of galaxy assembly. This process does not act preferentially on smaller mass haloes; bigger haloes \emph{always} release larger amounts of gas in a given volume of the Universe. However, if we include multi-phase gas accretion onto haloes, we find that only a few percent is unbound. We conclude that either non-gravitational processes may be in play to heat up the gas in the galaxies prior to unbinding by mergers or most of the baryons in the WHIM have never fallen into virialised dark matter haloes. We present a budget for stocking the WHIM compiled from recent work.