The impacts of ultraviolet radiation feedback on galaxies during the epoch of reionization

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution cosmological simulations to investigate how ultraviolet radiation feedback influences galaxy formation during the epoch of reionization, revealing suppression effects across different galaxy masses.

Contribution

It introduces detailed simulations that incorporate internal UV feedback processes and H2 chemistry, providing new insights into star formation suppression mechanisms during reionization.

Findings

Star formation is suppressed by UV and supernova feedback.

Low-mass galaxies lose gas via photo-evaporation, reducing star formation.

Massive galaxies also experience star formation suppression due to internal feedback effects.

Abstract

We explore the impacts of ultraviolet (UV) radiation feedback on galaxies during the epoch of reionisation by cosmological simulations in which hydrodynamics and the transfer of the H and He ionising photons are consistently coupled. Moreover we take into account H_2 non-equilibrium chemistry, including photo-dissociation. The most striking feature of the simulations is a high spatial resolution for the radiative transfer (RT) calculation which enables us to start considering not only external UV feedback processes but also internal UV feedback processes in each galaxy. We find that the star formation is significantly suppressed due to the internal UV and supernova (SN) feedback. In low mass galaxies with M<10^9Msun, a large amount of gas is evacuated by photo-evaporation as previous studies have shown, which results in the suppression of star formation. Surprisingly, star formation in massive halos is also strongly suppressed despite the fact that these halos hardly lose any gas by photo-evaporation. The suppression of star formation in massive halos is mainly caused by following two factors; (i) small scale clumpy structures in the galaxies are smoothened by the internal feedback, (ii) although the dense gas in the galaxies is mostly neutral, the H_2 formation and cooling processes are disturbed by mild photo-heating. Photo-dissociating radiations actually suppress star formation, but the magnitude of the effect is not so large in massive galaxies. Even though our simulation volume is too small to be a representative patch of the Universe during reionisation, we find that our simulated star formation rate densities and HI fractions at z=6-7 are consistent with those found in observations.