GMC Evolution in a Barred Spiral Galaxy with Star Formation and Thermal Feedback

TL;DR

This study investigates how star formation and thermal feedback influence giant molecular cloud populations in a barred spiral galaxy through high-resolution simulations, revealing feedback's role in cloud dynamics and star formation rates.

Contribution

It introduces high-resolution simulations comparing different star formation and feedback models, highlighting feedback's significant impact on cloud populations and galaxy dynamics.

Findings

Feedback increases transient cloud populations.

Feedback drives radial inflow of massive clouds.

Star formation slightly reduces transient clouds.

Abstract

We explore the impact of star formation and thermal stellar feedback on the giant molecular cloud (GMC) population forming in a M83-type barred spiral galaxy. We compare three high-resolution simulations (1.5 pc cell size) with different star formation/feedback models: one with no star formation, one with star formation but no feedback, and one with star formation and thermal energy injection. We analyze the resulting population of clouds, finding that we can identify the same population of massive, virialized clouds and transient, low-surface density clouds found in our previous work (that did not include star formation or feedback). Star formation and feedback can affect the mix of clouds we identify. In particular, star formation alone simply converts dense cloud gas into stars with only a small change to the cloud populations, principally resulting in a slight decrease in the transient population. Feedback, however, has a stronger impact: while it is not generally sufficient to entirely destroy the clouds, it does eject gas out of them, increasing the gas density in the inter-cloud region. This decreases the number of massive clouds, but substantially increases the transient cloud population. We also find that feedback tends to drive a net radial inflow of massive clouds, leading to an increase in the star formation rate in the bar region. We examine a number of possible reasons for this and conclude that it is possible that the drag force from the enhanced intercloud density could be responsible.