Clouds accreting from the IGM are not able to feed the star formation of low-redshift disc galaxies

Andrea Afruni, Gabriele Pezzulli, Filippo Fraternali, Asger Grønnow

Published 2023-06-01Version 1

Galactic halos accrete material from the intergalactic medium (IGM) and part of this accretion is expected to be in the form of cool ($T\sim10^4$ K) gas. A signature of this process could reside in the detection of a large amount of clouds in the circumgalactic medium (CGM) of low-redshift galaxies. However, whether this material is able to accrete onto the galaxies and feed their star formation or, instead, evaporates into the CGM hot phase (corona, $T\sim10^6$ K), is not yet understood. In this work, we investigate the evolution of cool CGM clouds accreted from the IGM and falling through a hot corona, similar to what is believed to surround low-redshift disc galaxies, through 3D high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations. We include the effects of gravity due to the dark matter halo, isotropic thermal conduction, radiative cooling and an ionizing UV background. We explored different values of parameters such as the halo mass, coronal mass, initial cloud velocity and strength of the thermal conduction. We find that, in all our simulations, the clouds lose the vast majority of their mass at distances larger than half of the galaxy virial radius and are completely dissolved in the corona before reaching the central galaxy. Our results indicate that cold accretion from the IGM can not feed star formation in $z \sim 0$ star-forming galaxies in halos with masses of $10^{11.9}\ M_{\odot}$ or above. This suggests that present-day massive star-forming galaxies can sustain their star formation only via the spontaneous or induced cooling of their hot corona.