Influence of baryonic physics in galaxy simulations: a semi-analytic treatment of the molecular component

TL;DR

This paper investigates how including molecular hydrogen in galaxy simulations affects gas dynamics and star formation, revealing a slow star formation process in outer galaxy regions that could store dark baryons.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-analytic treatment of molecular hydrogen in galaxy simulations, highlighting its role in slow star formation and baryon cycling.

Findings

Molecular hydrogen enables slow star formation in outer galaxy discs.

Gas depletion times are approximately 5 Gyr in the molecular phase.

The dense molecular phase may store a significant fraction of dark baryons.

Abstract

Recent work in galaxy formation has enlightened the important role of baryon physics, to solve the main problems encountered by the standard theory at the galactic scale, such as the galaxy stellar mass functions, or the missing satellites problem. The present work aims at investigating in particular the role of the cold and dense molecular phase, which could play a role of gas reservoir in the outer galaxy discs, with low star formation efficiency. Through TreeSPH simulations, implementing the cooling to low temperatures, and the inclusion of the molecular hydrogen component, several feedback efficiencies are studied, and results on the gas morphology and star formation are obtained. It is shown that molecular hydrogen allows some slow star formation (with gas depletion times of about 5 Gyr) to occur in the outer parts of the discs. This dense and quiescent phase might be a way to store a significant fraction of dark baryons, in a relatively long time-scale, in the complete baryonic cycle, connecting the galaxy discs to hot gaseous haloes and to the cosmic filaments.