Dwarf Galaxy Formation with H2-Regulated Star Formation: II. Gas-Rich Dark Galaxies at Redshift 2.5

TL;DR

This study uses cosmological simulations to show that H2-regulated star formation suppresses star formation in dwarf galaxies at high redshift, resulting in a large population of gas-rich dark galaxies with low star formation efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a physically-motivated H2-regulated star formation model that explains the abundance of gas-rich dark galaxies and addresses dwarf galaxy formation issues in LambdaCDM.

Findings

60% of halos at 10^10 Msun are dark galaxies at z=2.5

Dark galaxies have gas depletion timescales >20 Gyr

Simulation aligns with observed galaxy luminosity functions and neutral gas density

Abstract

We present a cosmological hydrodynamic simulation of the formation of dwarf galaxies at redshifts z>~2.5 using a physically-motivated model for H2-regulated star formation. Our simulation, performed using the Enzo code and reaching a peak resolution of 109 proper parsecs at z=2.5, extends the results of Kuhlen et al. (2012) to significantly lower redshifts. We show that a star formation prescription regulated by the local H2 abundance leads to the suppression of star formation in dwarf galaxy halos with M_h <~ 10^10 Msun and to a large population of gas-rich "dark galaxies" at z=2.5 with low star formation efficiencies and gas depletion timescales >20 Gyr. The fraction of dark galaxies is 60% at M_h ~ 10^10 Msun and increases rapidly with decreasing halo mass. Dark galaxies form late and their gaseous disks never reach the surface densities, > ~5700 Msun / pc^2 (Z/10^-3 Zsun)^(-0.88), that are required to build a substantial molecular fraction. Despite this large population of dark galaxies, we show that our H2-regulated simulation is consistent with both the observed luminosity function of galaxies and the cosmological mass density of neutral gas at z>~2.5. Moreover, our results provide a theoretical explanation for the recent detection in fluorescent Ly-alpha emission of gaseous systems at high redshift with little or no associated star formation. We further propose that H2-regulation may offer a fresh solution to a number of outstanding "dwarf galaxy problems" in LambdaCDM. In particular, H2-regulation leads galaxy formation to become effectively stochastic on mass scales of M_h ~ 10^10 Msun, and thus these massive dwarfs are not "too big to fail".