The Baryonic Assembly of Dark Matter Halos

TL;DR

This paper uses cosmological hydrodynamic simulations to analyze baryon accretion into dark matter halos, exploring the effects of galactic outflows, and provides insights into the cold and hot gas components across different halo masses and redshifts.

Contribution

It offers new quantitative analysis of baryonic accretion rates, the impact of galactic winds, and provides fitting formulas for cold gas accretion in halos without feedback.

Findings

Cold streams penetrate hot atmospheres at z>2 but fade at lower redshifts.

Baryon fractions are suppressed in low-mass halos due to outflows.

The transition halo mass for cold and hot gas components is around 10^11.5 Msun.

Abstract

We use a suite of cosmological hydrodynamic simulations to quantify the accretion rates of baryons into dark matter halos and the resulting baryon mass fractions, as a function of halo mass, redshift, and baryon type (including cold and hot gas). We find that the net baryonic accretion rates through the virial radius are sensitive to galactic outflows and explore a range of outflow parameters to illustrate the effects. We show that the cold gas accretion rate is in general not a simple universal factor of the dark matter accretion rate, and that galactic winds can cause star formation rates to deviate significantly from the external gas accretion rates, both via gas ejection and re-accretion. Furthermore, galactic winds can inject enough energy and momentum in the surrounding medium to slow down accretion altogether, especially in low-mass halos and at low redshift. By resolving the accretion rates versus radius from the halo centers, we show how cold streams penetrate the hot atmospheres of massive halos at z>2, but gradually disappear at lower redshift. The total baryon mass fraction is also strongly suppressed by outflows in low-mass halos, but is nearly universal in the absence of feedback in halos above the UV background suppression scale. The transition halo mass, at which the gas mass in halos is equal for the cold and hot components, is roughly constant at ~10^11.5 Msun and does not depend sensitively on the wind prescription. We provide simple fitting formulae for the cold gas accretion rate into halos in the no-wind case. Finally, we show that cold accretion is broadly consistent with driving the bulk of the highly star-forming galaxies observed at z~2, but that the more intense star formers likely sample the high end of the accretion rate distribution, and may be additionally fueled by a combination of gas recycling, gas re-accretion, hot mode cooling, and mergers.