Explosions During Galaxy Formation. Scale-Free Simulations

Hugo Martel, Paul R. Shapiro

Published 1999-04-09Version 1

When density fluctuations collapse gravitationally out of the expanding cosmological background universe to form galaxies, the secondary energy release which results can affect their subsequent evolution profoundly. We focus here on the effects of one form of such energy release - explosions, such as might result from the supernovae which end the lives of the first generation of massive stars to form inside protogalaxies. We are particularly interested in the consequences of the nonspherical geometry and continuous infall which are characteristic of galaxy formation from realistic initial and boundary conditions. As an idealized model which serves to illustrate and quantify the importance of these effects, we study the effect of explosions on the quasi-spherical objects which form at the intersections of filaments in the plane of a cosmological pancake, as a result of gravitational instability and fragmentation of the pancake. We study the formation and evolution of these "galaxies," subject to the explosive injection of energy at their centers, by numerical gas dynamical simulation in 3D utilizing our new, anisotropic version of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, Adaptive SPH ("ASPH"), with a P3M gravity solver.