Resolving small-scale cold circumgalactic gas in TNG50

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Vol. 498; no. 2; pp. 2391 - 2414
• Main Authors: Nelson, Dylan, Sharma, Prateek, Pillepich, Annalisa, Springel, Volker, Pakmor, Rüdiger, Weinberger, Rainer, Vogelsberger, Mark, Marinacci, Federico, Hernquist, Lars
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 01.10.2020
• Subjects: galaxies: formation; galaxies: evolution; galaxies: haloes
• ISSN: 0035-8711; 1365-2966
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa2419

ABSTRACT We use the high-resolution TNG50 cosmological magnetohydrodynamical simulation to explore the properties and origin of cold circumgalactic medium (CGM) gas around massive galaxies (M⋆ > 1011 M⊙ ) at intermediate redshift ($z \sim 0.5$). We discover a significant abundance of small-scale, cold gas structure in the CGM of ‘red and dead’ elliptical systems, as traced by neutral H i and Mg ii. Halos can host tens of thousands of discrete absorbing cloudlets, with sizes of order a kpc or smaller. With a Lagrangian tracer analysis, we show that cold clouds form due to strong $\delta \rho / \bar{\rho } \gg 1$ gas density perturbations that stimulate thermal instability. These local overdensities trigger rapid cooling from the hot virialized background medium at ∼107 K to radiatively inefficient ∼104 K clouds, which act as cosmologically long-lived, ‘stimulated cooling’ seeds in a regime where the global halo does not satisfy the classic tcool/tff < 10 criterion. Furthermore, these small clouds are dominated by magnetic rather than thermal pressure, with plasma β ≪ 1, suggesting that magnetic fields may play an important role. The number and total mass of cold clouds both increase with resolution, and the mgas ≃ 8 × 104 M⊙ cell mass of TNG50 enables the ∼ few hundred pc, small-scale CGM structure we observe to form. Finally, we make a preliminary comparison against observations from the COS-LRG, LRG-RDR, COS-Halos, and SDSS LRG surveys. We broadly find that our recent, high-resolution cosmological simulations produce sufficiently high covering fractions of extended, cold gas as observed to surround massive galaxies.