TY - JOUR
T1 - Great balls of FIRE II
T2 - The evolution and destruction of star clusters across cosmic time in a Milky Way-mass galaxy
AU - Rodriguez, Carl L.
AU - Hafen, Zachary
AU - Grudić, Michael Y.
AU - Lamberts, Astrid
AU - Sharma, Kuldeep
AU - Faucher-Giguère, Claude André
AU - Wetzel, Andrew
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors are grateful to Mike Boylan-Kolchin, Jeremy Webb, Sterl Phinney, Kyle Kremer, Fred Rasio, and Katie Breivik useful discussions. CR was supported by NSF Grant AST-2009916 and a New Investigator Research Grant from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation. ZH was supported by a Gary A. McCue postdoctoral fellowship at UC Irvine. MYG was supported by a CIERA Postdoctoral Fellowship and a NASA Hubble Fellowship (award HST-HF2-51479). AL acknowledges funding from the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique through the Programme National des Hautes Energies and the Programme National de Physique Stellaire as well as the ANR COSMERGE project, grant ANR-20-CE31-001 of the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche. CAFG was supported by NSF through grants AST-1715216, AST-2108230, and CAREER award AST-1652522; by NASA through grant 17-ATP17-0067; by STScI through grant HST-AR-16124.001-A; and by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement through a Cottrell Scholar Award. AW received support from: NSF via CAREER award AST-2045928 and grant AST-2107772; NASA ATP grant 80NSSC20K0513; HST grants AR-15809, GO-15902, GO-16273 from STScI. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1548562. Specifically, it used both the Bridges-2 system, which is supported by NSF award number ACI-1928147 at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), and the San Diego Supercomputing Center Comet cluster under XSEDE allocation PHY180017. Additional computations were run on the FASRC Cannon cluster supported by the FAS Division of Science Research Computing Group and by the Black Hole Initiative (funded by JTF and GBMF grants), both at Harvard University. This work also used computational resources provided by TACC Frontera allocations AST-20019 and AST-21002. Images of the m12i galaxy were generated with FIRE studio ( github.com/agurvich/FIRE_studio ), an open source Python visualization package designed with the FIRE simulations in mind.
Funding Information:
The authors are grateful to Mike Boylan-Kolchin, Jeremy Webb, Sterl Phinney, Kyle Kremer, Fred Rasio, and Katie Breivik useful discussions. CR was supported by NSF Grant AST-2009916 and a New Investigator Research Grant from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation. ZH was supported by a Gary A. McCue postdoctoral fellowship at UC Irvine. MYG was supported by a CIERA Postdoctoral Fellowship and a NASA Hubble Fellowship (award HST-HF2-51479). AL acknowledges funding from the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique through the Programme National des Hautes Energies and the Programme National de Physique Stellaire as well as the ANR COSMERGE project, grant ANR-20-CE31-001 of the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche. CAFG was supported by NSF through grants AST-1715216, AST-2108230, and CAREER award AST-1652522; by NASA through grant 17-ATP17-0067; by STScI through grant HST-AR-16124.001-A; and by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement through a Cottrell Scholar Award. AW received support from: NSF via CAREER award AST-2045928 and grant AST-2107772; NASA ATP grant 80NSSC20K0513; HST grants AR-15809, GO-15902, GO-16273 from STScI. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1548562. Specifically, it used both the Bridges-2 system, which is supported by NSF award number ACI-1928147 at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), and the San Diego Supercomputing Center Comet cluster under XSEDE allocation PHY180017. Additional computations were run on the FASRC Cannon cluster supported by the FAS Division of Science Research Computing Group and by the Black Hole Initiative (funded by JTF and GBMF grants), both at Harvard University. This work also used computational resources provided by TACC Frontera allocations AST-20019 and AST-21002. Images of the m12i galaxy were generated with FIRE studio (github.com/agurvich/FIRE studio), an open source Python visualization package designed with the FIRE simulations in mind.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society.
PY - 2023/5/1
Y1 - 2023/5/1
N2 - The current generation of galaxy simulations can resolve individual giant molecular clouds, the progenitors of dense star clusters. But the evolutionary fate of these young massive clusters, and whether they can become the old globular clusters (GCs) observed in many galaxies, is determined by a complex interplay of internal dynamical processes and external galactic effects. We present the first star-by-star N-body models of massive (N ∼ 105–107) star clusters formed in a FIRE-2 MHD simulation of a Milky Way-mass galaxy, with the relevant initial conditions and tidal forces extracted from the cosmological simulation. We select 895 (∼30 per cent) of the YMCs with >6 × 104 M☉ from Grudić et al. 2022 and integrate them to z = 0 using the cluster Monte Carlo code, CMC. This procedure predicts a MW-like system with 148 GCs, predominantly formed during the early, bursty mode of star formation. Our GCs are younger, less massive, and more core-collapsed than clusters in the Milky Way or M31. This results from the assembly history and age-metallicity relationship of the host galaxy: Younger clusters are preferentially born in stronger tidal fields and initially retain fewer stellar-mass black holes, causing them to lose mass faster and reach core collapse sooner than older GCs. Our results suggest that the masses and core/half-light radii of GCs are shaped not only by internal dynamical processes, but also by the specific evolutionary history of their host galaxies. These results emphasize that N-body studies with realistic stellar physics are crucial to understanding the evolution and present-day properties of GC systems.
AB - The current generation of galaxy simulations can resolve individual giant molecular clouds, the progenitors of dense star clusters. But the evolutionary fate of these young massive clusters, and whether they can become the old globular clusters (GCs) observed in many galaxies, is determined by a complex interplay of internal dynamical processes and external galactic effects. We present the first star-by-star N-body models of massive (N ∼ 105–107) star clusters formed in a FIRE-2 MHD simulation of a Milky Way-mass galaxy, with the relevant initial conditions and tidal forces extracted from the cosmological simulation. We select 895 (∼30 per cent) of the YMCs with >6 × 104 M☉ from Grudić et al. 2022 and integrate them to z = 0 using the cluster Monte Carlo code, CMC. This procedure predicts a MW-like system with 148 GCs, predominantly formed during the early, bursty mode of star formation. Our GCs are younger, less massive, and more core-collapsed than clusters in the Milky Way or M31. This results from the assembly history and age-metallicity relationship of the host galaxy: Younger clusters are preferentially born in stronger tidal fields and initially retain fewer stellar-mass black holes, causing them to lose mass faster and reach core collapse sooner than older GCs. Our results suggest that the masses and core/half-light radii of GCs are shaped not only by internal dynamical processes, but also by the specific evolutionary history of their host galaxies. These results emphasize that N-body studies with realistic stellar physics are crucial to understanding the evolution and present-day properties of GC systems.
KW - Galaxy: evolution
KW - galaxies: star clusters: general
KW - galaxies: star formation
KW - globular clusters: general
KW - stars: black holes
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U2 - 10.1093/mnras/stad578
DO - 10.1093/mnras/stad578
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85150325840
SN - 0035-8711
VL - 521
SP - 124
EP - 147
JO - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
JF - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
IS - 1
ER -