Formation of late-type spiral galaxies: Gas return from stellar populations regulates disk destruction and bulge growth

Abstract

Spiral galaxies have most of their stellar mass in a large rotating disk, and only a modest fraction in a central spheroidal bulge. This challenges present models of galaxy formation: galaxies form at the center of dark matter halos through a combination of hierarchical merging and gas accretion along cold streams. Cosmological simulations thus predict that galaxies rapidly grow their bulge through mergers and instabilities and end up with most of their mass in the bulge and an angular momentum much below the observed level, except in dwarf galaxies. We propose that the continuous return of gas by stellar populations over cosmic times could help to solve this issue. A population of stars formed at a given instant typically returns half of its initial mass in the form of gas over 10 billion years, and the process is not dominated by supernovae explosions but by the long-term mass-loss from low- and intermediate-mass stars. Using simulations of galaxy formation, we show that this gas recycling can strongly affect the structural evolution of massive galaxies, potentially solving the bulge fraction issue, as the bulge-to-disk ratio of a massive galaxy can be divided by a factor of 3. The continuous recycling of baryons through star formation and stellar mass loss helps the growth of disks and their survival to interactions and mergers. Instead of forming only early-type, spheroid-dominated galaxies (S0 and ellipticals), the standard cosmological model can successfully account for massive late-type, disk-dominated spiral galaxies (Sb-Sc). © 2010. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.