The Supersonic Project: The Early Evolutionary Path of SIGOs

TL;DR

This paper investigates the early evolution of Supersonically Induced Gas Objects (SIGOs) in the universe, focusing on their potential to cool, collapse, and form stars outside dark matter halos, with implications for globular cluster formation.

Contribution

It introduces a revised critical density for SIGO collapse, analyzes their evolution with molecular cooling, and highlights their potential to form stars outside halos in the early universe.

Findings

SIGOs tend to be inhibited from collapsing due to prolateness.

Artificial two-body relaxation effects limit the simulated SIGOs' longevity.

Some SIGOs can cool and collapse outside halos before falling into dark matter halos.

Abstract

Supersonically Induced Gas Objects (SIGOs) are a class of early Universe objects that have gained attention as a potential formation route for globular clusters. SIGOs have only recently begun to be studied in the context of molecular hydrogen cooling, which is key to characterizing their structure and evolution. Studying the population-level properties of SIGOs with molecular cooling is important for understanding their potential for collapse and star formation, and central for addressing whether SIGOs can survive to the present epoch. Here, we investigate the evolution of SIGOs before they form stars, using a combination of numerical and analytical analysis. For example, we study various timescales important to the evolution of SIGOs at a population level in the presence of molecular cooling. Revising the previous formulation for the critical density of collapse for SIGOs allows us to show that their prolateness tends to act as an inhibiting factor to collapse. We find that simulated SIGOs are limited by artificial two-body relaxation effects that tend to disperse them, an effect of their limited resolution. We expect that SIGOs in nature will be longer-lived compared to our simulations. Further, the fall-back timescale on which SIGOs fall into nearby dark matter halos, potentially producing a globular-cluster-like system, is frequently longer than their cooling timescale and the collapse timescale on which they shrink through gravity. Therefore, some SIGOs have time to cool and collapse outside of halos despite initially failing to exceed the critical density, even without considering metal line cooling. From this analysis we conclude that SIGOs should form stars outside of halos in non-negligible stream velocity patches in the Universe.