The Implications of Extreme Outflows from Extreme Starbursts

TL;DR

This study extends previous analysis of starburst-driven galactic outflows by including rare, high-velocity outflows, revealing they follow established trends and can be explained by a model of clouds accelerated by gravity and starburst momentum.

Contribution

It introduces a larger sample of extreme outflows, demonstrating they follow existing scaling relations and can be explained by a unified physical framework.

Findings

High-velocity outflows follow the same trends as typical outflows.

Outflow velocity correlates with galaxy stellar mass, circular velocity, and SFR.

A simple model of cloud acceleration explains the observed outflow properties.

Abstract

Interstellar ultraviolet absorption-lines provide crucial information about the properties of galactic outflows. In this paper, we augment our previous analysis of the systematic properties of starburst-driven galactic outflows by expanding our sample to include a rare population of starbursts with exceptionally high outflow velocities. In principle, these could be a qualitatively different phenomenon from more typical outflows. However, we find that instead these starbursts lie on, or along the extrapolation of, the trends defined by the more typical systems studied previously by us. We exploit the wide dynamic range provided by this new sample to determine scaling relations of outflow velocity with galaxy stellar mass (M*), circular velocity, star-formation rate (SFR), SFR/M*, and SFR/area. We argue that these results can be accommodated within the general interpretational framework we previously advocated, in which a population of ambient interstellar or circum-galactic clouds is accelerated by the combined forces of gravity and the momentum flux from the starburst. We show that this simple physical picture is consistent with both the strong cosmological evolution of galactic outflows in typical star-forming galaxies and the paucity of such galaxies with spectra showing inflows. We also present simple parameterizations of these results that can be implemented in theoretical models and numerical simulations of galaxy evolution.