Dwarf galaxies form stars extremely slowly, and they are quite sensitive to the physics of feedback and dark matter.
In a paper, my coauthors and I argue that we have identified the mechanism by which dwarfs keep their star formation rates low. Young stars emitting non-ionizing FUV photons can heat nearby gas via the grain photoelectric effect. In our simulations, this effect stabilizes the gas against collapse until the nearby stellar populations age enough for the FUV flux to drop. This slows down star formation to the levels observed in the real universe.
The simulations we present in the paper were run with a fork of the publicly-available Enzo code, in particular change set daed04d1e5e6 of the repository https://bitbucket.org/jforbes/enzo-dev-jforbes.
In a paper, my coauthors and I argue that we have identified the mechanism by which dwarfs keep their star formation rates low. Young stars emitting non-ionizing FUV photons can heat nearby gas via the grain photoelectric effect. In our simulations, this effect stabilizes the gas against collapse until the nearby stellar populations age enough for the FUV flux to drop. This slows down star formation to the levels observed in the real universe.
The simulations we present in the paper were run with a fork of the publicly-available Enzo code, in particular change set daed04d1e5e6 of the repository https://bitbucket.org/jforbes/enzo-dev-jforbes.
