Properties of gas in and around galaxy haloes

TL;DR

This study uses cosmological simulations to analyze the properties and behaviors of gas within and around galaxy haloes at different redshifts, focusing on cold and hot gas modes, their origins, and observability.

Contribution

It provides detailed insights into the characteristics of cold and hot gas modes in galaxy haloes, including their distribution, metallicity, and dynamics, based on large hydrodynamical simulations.

Findings

Cold-mode gas is confined to filaments and is infalling.

Hot-mode gas dominates in outer halo regions.

Metal-line cooling influences gas flow near galaxies.

Abstract

We study the properties of gas inside and around galaxy haloes as a function of radius and halo mass, focussing mostly on z=2, but also showing some results for z=0. For this purpose, we use a suite of large cosmological, hydrodynamical simulations from the OverWhelmingly Large Simulations project. The properties of cold- and hot-mode gas, which we separate depending on whether the temperature has been higher than 10^5.5 K while it was extragalactic, are clearly distinguishable in the outer parts of massive haloes (virial temperatures >> 10^5 K. The differences between cold- and hot-mode gas resemble those between inflowing and outflowing gas. The cold-mode gas is mostly confined to clumpy filaments that are approximately in pressure equilibrium with the diffuse, hot-mode gas. Besides being colder and denser, cold-mode gas typically has a much lower metallicity and is much more likely to be infalling. However, the spread in the properties of the gas is large, even for a given mode and a fixed radius and halo mass, which makes it impossible to make strong statements about individual gas clouds. Metal-line cooling causes a strong cooling flow near the central galaxy, which makes it hard to distinguish gas accreted through the cold and hot modes in the inner halo. Stronger feedback results in larger outflow velocities and pushes hot-mode gas to larger radii. The gas properties evolve as expected from virial arguments, which can also account for the dependence of many gas properties on halo mass. We argue that cold streams penetrating hot haloes are observable as high-column density HI Lyman-alpha absorption systems in sightlines near massive foreground galaxies.