Galaxy Formation – a few basics

Galaxies are gravitationally bound condensations of stars and gas in a mostly empty, expanding universe. The tens of billions of solar masses of baryonic material that comprise the stars and gas of the Milky Way now reside mostly within a radius of 20 kpc. At the average density of the universe, the equivalent mass fills a spherical volume with a comoving radius a bit in excess of 1 Mpc. This is a large factor by which a protogalaxy must collapse, starting from the very smooth (~ 1 part in 10⁵) initial condition at z ​= ​1090 observed in the CMB (Planck Collaboration et al., 2018). Dark matter — in particular, non-baryonic cold dark matter — plays an essential role in speeding this process along.

The mass-energy of the early universe is initially dominated by the radiation field. The baryons are held in thrall to the photons until the expansion of the universe turns the tables and matter becomes dominant. Exactly when this happens depends on the mass density (Peebles, 1980); for our purposes it suffices to realize that the baryonic components of galaxies can not begin to form until well after the time of the CMB. However, since CDM does not interact with photons, it is not subject to this limitation. The dark matter can begin to form structures — dark matter halos — that form the scaffolding of future structure. Essential to the ΛCDM galaxy formation paradigm is that the dark matter halos form first, seeding the subsequent formation of luminous galaxies by providing the potential wells into which baryons can condense once free from the radiation field.

The theoretical expectation for how dark matter halos form is well understood at this juncture. Numerical simulations of cold dark matter — mass that interacts only through gravity in an expanding universe — show that quasi-spherical dark matter halos form with a characteristic ‘NFW’ (e.g., Navarro et al., 1997) density profile. These have a ‘cuspy’ inner density profile in which the density of dark matter increases towards the center approximately ¹ as a power law, ρ(r → 0) ~ r⁻¹. At larger radii, the density profile falls of as ρ(r → ∞) ~ r⁻³. The centers of these halos are the density peaks around which galaxies can form.

The galaxies that we observe are composed of stars and gas: normal baryonic matter. The theoretical expectation for how baryons behave during galaxy formation is not well understood (Scannapieco et al., 2012). This results in a tremendous and long-standing disconnect between theory and observation. We can, however, stipulate a few requirements as to what needs to happen. Dark matter halos must form first; the baryons fall into these halos afterwards. Dark matter halos are observed to extend well beyond the outer edges of visible galaxies, so baryons must condense to the centers of dark matter halos. This condensation may proceed through both the hierarchical merging of protogalactic fragments (a process that has a proclivity to form ETGs) and the more gentle accretion of gas into rotating disks (a requirement to form LTGs). In either case, some fraction of the baryons form the observed, luminous component of a galaxy at the center of a CDM halo. This condensation of baryons necessarily affects the dark matter gravitationally, with the net effect of dragging some of it towards the center (Blumenthal et al., 1986; Dubinski, 1994; Gnedin et al., 2004; Sellwood and McGaugh, 2005a), thus compressing the dark matter halo from its initial condition as indicated by dark matter-only simulations like those of Navarro et al. (1997). These processes must all occur, but do not by themselves suffice to explain real galaxies.

Galaxies formed in models that consider only the inevitable effects described above suffer many serious defects. They tend to be too massive (Abadi et al., 2003; Benson et al., 2003), too small (the angular momentum catastrophe: Katz, 1992; Steinmetz, 1999; D’Onghia et al., 2006), have systematically too large bulge-to-disk ratios (the bulgeless galaxy problem: D’Onghia and Burkert, 2004; Kormendy et al., 2010), have dark matter halos with too much mass at small radii (the cusp-core problem: Moore et al., 1999b; Kuzio de Naray et al., 2008, 2009; de Blok, 2010; Kuzio de Naray and McGaugh, 2014), and have the wrong over-all mass function (the over-cooling problem, e.g., Benson, 2010), also known locally as the missing satellite problem (Klypin et al., 1999; Moore et al., 1999a). This long list of problems have kept the field of galaxy formation a lively one: there is no risk of it becoming a victim its own success through the appearance of one clearly-correct standard model.

Historical threads of development

Like last time, this is a minimalist outline of the basics that are relevant to our discussion. A proper history of this field would be much longer. Indeed, I rather doubt it would be possible to write a coherent text on the subject, which means different things to different scientists.

Entering the 1980s, options for galaxy formation were frequently portrayed as a dichotomy between monolithic galaxy formation (Eggen et al., 1962) and the merger of protogalactic fragments (Searle and Zinn, 1978). The basic idea of monolithic galaxy formation is that the initial ~ 1 Mpc cloud of gas that would form the Milky Way experienced dissipational collapse in one smooth, adiabatic process. This is effective at forming the disk, with only a tiny bit of star formation occurring during the collapse phase to provide the stars of the ancient, metal-poor stellar halo. In contrast, the Galaxy could have been built up by the merger of smaller protogalactic fragments, each with their own life as smaller galaxies prior to merging. The latter is more natural to the emergence of structure from the initial conditions observed in the CMB, where small lumps condense more readily than large ones. Indeed, this effectively forms the basis of the modern picture of hierarchical galaxy formation (Efstathiou et al., 1988).

Hierarchical galaxy formation is effective at forming bulges and pressure-supported ETGs, but is anathema to the formation of orderly disks. Dynamically cold disks are fragile and prefer to be left alone: the high rate of merging in the hierarchical ΛCDM model tends to destroy the dynamically cold state in which most spirals are observed to exist (Abadi et al., 2003; Peebles, 2020; Toth and Ostriker, 1992). Consequently, there have been some rather different ideas about galaxy formation: if one starts from the initial conditions imposed by the CMB, hierarchical galaxy formation is inevitable. If instead one works backwards from the observed state of galaxy disks, the smooth settling of gaseous disks in relatively isolated monoliths seems more plausible.

In addition to different theoretical notions, our picture of the galaxy population was woefully incomplete. An influential study by Freeman (1970) found that 28 of three dozen spirals shared very nearly the same central surface brightness. This was generalized into a belief that all spirals had the same (high) surface brightness, and came to be known as Freeman’s Law. Ultimately this proved to be a selection effect, as pointed out early by Disney (1976) and Allen and Shu (1979). However, it was not until much later (McGaugh et al., 1995a) that this became widely recognized. In the mean time, the prevailing assumption was that Freeman’s Law held true (e.g., van der Kruit, 1987) and all spirals had practically the same surface brightness. In particular, it was the central surface brightness of the disk component of spiral galaxies that was thought to be universal, while bulges and ETGs varied in surface brightness. Variation in the disk component of LTGs was thought to be restricted to variations in size, which led to variations in luminosity at fixed surface brightness.

Consequently, most theoretical effort was concentrated on the bright objects in the high-mass (M_∗ ​> ​10¹⁰ ​M_⊙) clump in Fig. 2. Some low mass dwarf galaxies were known to exist, but were considered to be insignificant because they contained little mass. Low surface brightness galaxies violated Freeman’s Law, so were widely presumed not to exist, or be at most a rare curiosity (Bosma & Freeman, 1993). A happy consequence of this unfortunate state of affairs was that as observations of diffuse LSB galaxies were made, they forced then-current ideas about galaxy formation into a regime that they had not anticipated, and which many could not accommodate.

The similarity and difference between high surface brightness (HSB) and LSB galaxies is illustrated by Fig. 3. Both are rotationally supported, late type disk galaxies. Both show spiral structure, though it is more prominent in the HSB. More importantly, both systems are of comparable linear diameter. They exist roughly at opposite ends of a horizontal line in Fig. 2. Their differing stellar masses stem from the surface density of their stars rather than their linear extent — exactly the opposite of what had been inferred from Freeman’s Law. Any model of galaxy formation and evolution must account for the distribution of size (or surface brightness) at a given mass as well as the number density of galaxies as a function of mass. Both aspects of the galaxy population remain problematic to this day.

Throughout my thesis work, my spouse joked that my LSB galaxy images looked like bug splots on the telescope. You can see more of them here. And a few more here. And lots more on Jim Schombert’s web pages, here and here and here.