EDGE: The emergence of dwarf galaxy scaling relations from cosmological radiation-hydrodynamics simulations

Martin Rey, Ethan Taylor, Stacy Y. Kim, Eric P. Andersson, Andrew Pontzen, Oscar Agertz, Justin I. Read, Corentin Cadiou, Robert M Yates, Matthew D. A. Orkney, Dirk Scholte, Amelie Saintonge, Joseph Breneman, Kristen B W McQuinn, Claudia Muni, Payel Das

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We present a new suite of edge (‘Engineering Dwarfs at Galaxy formation’s Edge’) cosmological zoom simulations. The suite includes 15 radiation-hydrodynamical dwarf galaxies covering the ultra-faint to the dwarf irregular regime (104 ≤ M⋆(z = 0) ≤ 108 M⊙) to enable comparisons with observed scaling relations. Each object in the suite is evolved at high resolution (≈3 pc) and includes stellar radiation, winds and supernova feedback channels. We compare with previous edge simulations without radiation, finding that radiative feedback results in significantly weaker galactic outflows. This generalises our previous findings to a wide mass range, and reveals that the effect is most significant at low M⋆. Despite this difference, stellar masses stay within a factor of two of each other, and key scaling relations of dwarf galaxies (size-mass, neutral gas-stellar mass, gas-phase mass-metallicity) emerge correctly in both simulation suites. Only the stellar mass – stellar metallicity relation is strongly sensitive to the change in feedback. This highlights how obtaining statistical samples of dwarf galaxy stellar abundances with next-generation spectrographs will be key to probing and constraining the baryon cycle of dwarf galaxies.
Original languageEnglish
JournalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
DOIs
Publication statusAcceptance date - 26 Jun 2025

Data Availability Statement

The data underlying this article will be shared upon reasonable request to the corresponding author.

Acknowledgements

We thank the referee for constructive criticism that improved the quality of the paper. MR thanks Astha Agarwal, Harley Katz, Taysun Kimm, Joakim Rosdahl and Mahsa Sanati for useful discussions and comments during the preparation of this manuscript.

Funding

MR acknowledges support from the Beecroft Fellowship funded by Adrian Beecroft. ET acknowledges the UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for support (grant ST/V50712X/1). O.A. acknowledges support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Swedish Research Council (grant 2019-04659), the Swedish National Space Agency (SNSADnr2023-00164),and the LMK foundation. JIR would like to thank the STFC for support from grants ST/Y002865/1 and ST/Y002857/1. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 818085 GM Galaxies. This work was performed using the DiRAC Data Intensive service at Leicester, operated by the University of Leicester IT Services, which forms part of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility (www.dirac.ac.uk). The equipment was funded by BEIS capital funding via STFC capital grants ST/K000373/1 and ST/R002363/1 and STFC DiRAC Operations grant ST/R001014/1. DiRAC is part of the National eInfrastructure. The authors acknowledge the use of the UCL Grace High Performance Computing Facility, the Surrey Eureka supercomputer facility, and their associated support services. This work was partially supported by the UCL Cosmoparticle Initiative. We thank the developers and maintainers of pynbody (Pontzen et al. 2013), tangos (Pontzen & Tremmel 2018), NumPy (van der Walt et al. 2011; Harris et al. 2020), SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020), jupyter (Ragan-Kelley et al. 2014), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), the Astrophysics Data Service and the arXiv preprint repository for providing open-source softwares that were used extensively in this work.

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