Day 1564

Wednesday.

1905.01309
The life cycle of the central molecular zone.  I: Inflow, star formation, and winds
Armillotta, et al

We present a study of the gas cycle and star formation history in the central 500 pc of the Milky Way, known as Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). Through hydrodynamical simulations of the inner 4.5 kpc of our Galaxy, we follow the gas cycle in a completely self-consistent way, starting from gas radial inflow due to the Galactic bar, the channelling of this gas into a dense, star-forming ring/stream at ~ 200 - 300 pc from the Galactic centre, and the launching of galactic outflows powered by stellar feedback. We find that star formation activity in the CMZ goes through oscillatory burst/quench cycles, with a period of tens to hundreds of Myr, characterised by roughly constant gas mass but order-of-magnitude level variations in the star formation rate. Comparison with the observed present-day star formation rate of the CMZ suggests that we are currently near a minimum of this cycle. Stellar feedback drives a mainly two-phase wind off the Galactic disc. The warm phase dominates the mass flux, and carries 100 - 200 % of the gas mass converted into stars. However, most of this gas goes into a fountain and falls back onto the disc rather than escaping the Galaxy. The hot phase carries most of the energy, with a time-averaged energy outflow rate of 10 - 20 % of the supernova energy budget.

1905.01324

Photometry of high-redshift blended galaxies using deep learning

Boucaud, et al

The new generation of deep photometric surveys requires unprecedentedly precise shape and photometry measurements of billions of galaxies to achieve their main science goals. At such depths, one major limiting factor is the blending of galaxies due to line-of-sight projection, with an expected fraction of blended galaxies of up to 50%. Current deblending approaches are in most cases either too slow or not accurate enough to reach the level of requirements. This work explores the use of deep neural networks to estimate the photometry of blended pairs of galaxies in monochrome space images, similar to the ones that will be delivered by the Euclid space telescope. Using a clean sample of isolated galaxies from the CANDELS survey, we artificially blend them and train two different network models to recover the photometry of the two galaxies. We show that our approach can recover the original photometry of the galaxies before being blended with $\sim$7% accuracy without any human intervention and without any assumption on the galaxy shape. This represents an improvement of at least a factor of 4 compared to the classical SExtractor approach. We also show that forcing the network to simultaneously estimate a binary segmentation map results in a slightly improved photometry. All data products and codes will be made public to ease the comparison with other approaches on a common data set.

Nature 569

A nearby nerutro-star merger explains the actinide abundances in the early Solar System

Bartos & Marka

A growing body of evidence indicates that binary neutron-star mergers are the primary origin of heavy elements produced exclusively through rapid neutron capture (the ‘r-process’). As neutron-star mergers occur infrequently, their deposition of radioactive isotopes into the pre-solar nebula could have been dominated by a few nearby events. Although short-lived r-process isotopes—with half-lives shorter than 100 million years—are no longer present in the Solar System, their abundances in the early Solar System are known because their daughter products were preserved in high-temperature condensates found in meteorites. Here we report that abundances of short-lived r-process isotopes in the early Solar System point to their origin in neutron-star mergers, and indicate substantial deposition by a single nearby merger event. By comparing numerical simulations with the early Solar System abundance ratios of actinides produced exclusively through the r-process, we constrain the rate of occurrence of their Galactic production sites to within about 1−100 per million years. This is consistent with observational estimates of neutron-star merger rates, but rules out supernovae and stellar sources. We further find that there was probably a single nearby merger that produced much of the curium and a substantial fraction of the plutonium present in the early Solar System. Such an event may have occurred about 300 parsecs away from the pre-solar nebula, approximately 80 million years before the formation of the Solar System.

1905.02216

New Horizon: on theo ring of the stellar disk and spheroid of field galaxies

Park, et al

The origin of the disk and spheroid of galaxies has been a key open question in understanding their morphology. Using the high-resolution cosmological simulation, New Horizon, we explore kinematically decomposed disk and spheroidal components of 144 field galaxies with masses greater than $\rm 10^9\,M_{\odot}$ at $z=0.7$. The origins of stellar particles are classified according to their birthplace (in situ or ex situ) and their orbits at birth. Before disk settling, stars form mainly through chaotic mergers between proto-galaxies and become part of the spheroidal component. When disk settling starts, we find that more massive galaxies begin to form disk stars from earlier epochs; massive galaxies commence to develop their disks at $z\sim1-2$, while low-mass galaxies do after $z\sim1$. The formation of disks is affected by accretion as well, as mergers can trigger gas turbulence or induce misaligned gas infall that prevents galaxies from forming co-rotating disk stars. The importance of accreted stars is greater in more massive galaxies, especially in developing massive spheroids. A significant fraction of the spheroids comes from the disk stars that are perturbed, which becomes more important at lower redshifts. Some ($\sim12.5\%$) of our massive galaxies develop counter-rotating disks from the gas infall misaligned with the existing disk plane, which can last for more than a Gyr until they become the dominant component, and flip the angular momentum of the galaxy in the opposite direction. The final disk-to-total ratio of a galaxy needs to be understood in relation to its stellar mass and accretion history. We quantify the significance of the stars with different origins and provide them as guiding values.

1905.02217

Formation histories of stars, clusters and globular clusters in the E-MOSAICS simulations

Reina-Campos, et al

The formation histories of globular clusters (GCs) are a key diagnostic for understanding their relation to the evolution of the Universe through cosmic time. We use the suite of 25 cosmological zoom-in simulations of present-day Milky Way-mass galaxies from the E-MOSAICS project to study the formation histories of stars, clusters, and GCs, and how these are affected by the environmental dependence of the cluster formation physics. We find that the median lookback time of GC formation in these galaxies is ${\sim}10.73~$Gyr ($z=2.1$), roughly $2.5~$Gyr earlier than that of the field stars (${\sim}8.34~$Gyr or $z=1.1$). The epoch of peak GC formation is mainly determined by the time evolution of the maximum cluster mass, which depends on the galactic environment and largely increases with the gas pressure. Different metallicity subpopulations of stars, clusters and GCs present overlapping formation histories, implying that star and cluster formation represent continuous processes. The metal-poor GCs ($-2.5<[\rm Fe/H]<-1.5$) of our galaxies are older than the metal-rich GC subpopulation ($-1.0<[\rm Fe/H]<-0.5$), forming $12.13~$Gyr and $10.15~$Gyr ago ($z=3.7$ and $z=1.8$), respectively. The median ages of GCs are found to decrease gradually with increasing metallicity, which suggests different GC metallicity subpopulations do not form independently and their spatial and kinematic distributions are the result of their evolution in the context of hierarchical galaxy formation and evolution. We predict that proto-GC formation is most prevalent at $2\lesssim z \lesssim 3$, which could be tested with observations of lensed galaxies using JWST.

1905.02278

Super-CMB fluctuations can resolve the Hubble tension

Adhikari, Huterer

We study the covariance in the angular power spectrum estimates of CMB fluctuations when the primordial fluctuations are non-Gaussian. The non-Gaussian covariance comes from a nonzero connected four-point correlation function --- or the trispectrum in Fourier space --- and can be large when long-wavelength (super-CMB) modes are strongly coupled to short-wavelength modes. The effect of such non-Gaussian covariance can be modeled through additional freedom in the theoretical CMB angular power spectrum and can lead to different inferred values of the standard cosmological parameters relative to those in $\Lambda$CDM. Taking the collapsed limit of the primordial trispectrum in the quasi-single field inflation model as an example, we study how the six standard $\Lambda$CDM parameters shift when two additional parameters describing the trispectrum are allowed. We find that the combination of Planck temperature data along with type Ia supernovae from Panstarrs and the distance-ladder measurement of the Hubble constant shows strong evidence for a primordial trispectrum-induced non-Gaussian covariance, with a likelihood improvement of $\Delta \chi^2 \approx -15$ relative to $\Lambda$CDM. The improvement is driven by Planck data's preference for a higher lensing amplitude, which leads to an upward shift of the Planck-inferred Hubble constant.

1905.02306

Solar-center--limb variation of the strengths of spectral lines: classification and interpretation of observed trends

Takeda, UeNo

The equivalent widths (W) of 565 spectral lines in the wavelength range of 4690--6870A were evaluated at 31 consecutive points from the solar disk center (mu=cos(theta)=1) to near the limb (mu=0.25) by applying the synthetic spectrum-fitting technique, in order to clarify the nature of their center--limb variations, especially the observed slope differing from line to line and its interpretation in terms of line properties. We found that the distribution of the gradient beta (= -dlog W/dlog mu) well correlates with that of dlog W/dlog T index, which means that the center-to-limb variation of W is determined mainly by the T-sensitivity of individual lines because the line-forming region shifts towards upper layers of lower T as we go toward the limb. Further, the key to understanding the behavior of dlog W/dlog T (depending on the temperature sensitivity of number population) is whether the considered species is in minor population stage or major population stage, by which the distribution of beta is explained in terms of differences in excitation potential and line strengths. All the center--limb data of equivalent widths (as well as line-of-sight turbulent velocity dispersions, elemental abundances, and mean line-formation depths derived as by-products) along with the solar spectra used for our analysis are made available as on-line materials.

1905.02480

Lyman radiation hydrodynamics of turbulent H II regions in molecular clouds: a physical origin of LyC leakage and the associated Ly$\alpha$ spectra

Kakiichi, Gronke

We examine Lyman continuum (LyC) leakage through H II regions regulated by turbulence and radiative feedback in a giant molecular cloud in the context of fully-coupled radiation hydrodynamics (RHD). The physical relations of the LyC escape with H I covering fraction, kinematics, spectral hardness, and the emergent Lyman-$\alpha$ (Ly$\alpha$) line profiles are studied using a series of RHD turbulence simulations performed with RAMSES-RT. The turbulence-regulated mechanism allows ionizing photons to leak out at early times before the onset of supernova feedback. The LyC photons escape through turbulence-generated low column density channels which are evacuated efficiently by radiative feedback via photoheating-induced shocks across the D-type ionization fronts. Ly$\alpha$ photons funnel through the photoionized channels along the paths of LyC escape, resulting in a diverse Ly$\alpha$ spectral morphology including narrow double-peaked profiles. The Ly$\alpha$ peak separation is controlled by the residual H I column density of the channels and the line asymmetry correlates with the porosity and multiphase structure of the H II region. This mechanism through the turbulent H II regions can naturally reproduce the observed Ly$\alpha$ spectral characteristics of some of LyC-leaking galaxies. This RHD turbulence-origin provides an appealing hypothesis to explain high LyC leakage from very young ($\sim3$ Myr) star-forming galaxies found in the local Universe without need of extreme galactic outflows nor supernova feedback. We discuss the implications of the turbulent H II regions on other nebular emission lines and a possible observational test with the Magellanic System and local blue compact dwarf galaxies as analogs of reionization-era systems.