Journal article
Origin of cosmic chemical abundances
Umberto Maio, Edoardo Tescari
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2015
Abstract
Cosmological N-body hydrodynamic computations following atomic and molecular chemistry (e-, H, H+, H-, He,He+, He++, D, D+, H2, H2+, HD, HeH+), gas cooling, star formation and production of heavy elements (C, N, O, Ne,Mg, Si, S,Ca, Fe, etc.) from stars covering a range of mass and metallicity are used to explore the origin of several chemical abundance patterns and to study both the metal and molecular content during simulated galaxy assembly. The resulting trends show a remarkable similarity to up-to-date observations of the most metal-poor damped Lyman a absorbers at redshift z ≳ 2. These exhibit a transient nature and represent collapsing gaseous structures captured while cooling is becom..
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Grants
Awarded by Marie Curie Fellowship by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7)
Awarded by Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO)
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous referee for detailed and constructive comments which helped us extend and improve significantly the original manuscript. We acknowledge useful discussions with A. Arino-i-Prats, S. Borgani, J. Cooke, R. Cooke, S. Cristiani, G. De Lucia, K. Dolag, F. Matteucci, P. Molaro, M. Viel, F. A. Villaescusa Navarro and F. Vincenzo. UM was supported through a Marie Curie Fellowship by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 267251. ET is supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) through project number CE110001020. This research was undertaken with the assistance of resources from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI),<SUP>14</SUP> which is supported by the Australian Government. We would like to thank Volker Springel for making available to us the non-public version of the GADGET-3 code. For the simulations we used the raijin, vayu and xe clusters at the NCI National Facility. For the post-processing, we also used the edward High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster at the University of Melbourne.<SUP>15</SUP> Mass functions have been computed by means of the online calculator http://hmf.icrar.org by Murray, Power & Robotham (2013). We acknowledge the NASA Astrophysics Data System and the JSTOR archives for their bibliographic tools.