Galaxy formation hydrodynamics: From cosmic flows to star-forming clouds

Original · EN

Major progress has been made over the last few years in understanding hydrodynamical processes on cosmological scales, in particular how galaxies get their baryons. There is increasing recognition that a large part of the baryons accrete smoothly onto galaxies, and that internal evolution processes play a major role in shaping galaxies - mergers are not necessarily the dominant process. However, predictions from the various assembly mechanisms are still in large disagreement with the observed properties of galaxies in the nearby Universe. Small-scale processes have a major impact on the global evolution of galaxies over a Hubble time and the usual sub-grid models account for them in a far too uncertain way. Understanding when, where and at which rate galaxies formed their stars becomes crucial to understand the formation of galaxy populations. I discuss recent improvements and current limitations in "resolved" modelling of star formation, aiming at explicitely capturing star-forming instabilities, in cosmological and galaxy-sized simulations. Such models need to develop three-dimensional turbulence in the ISM, which requires parsec-scale resolution at redshift zero.