The Supersonic Project: Early Star Formation with the Streaming Velocity

Kavli Affiliate: Mark Vogelsberger

| First 5 Authors: William Lake, Claire E. Williams, Smadar Naoz, Federico Marinacci, Blakesley Burkhart

| Summary:

At high redshifts ($zgtrsim12$), the relative velocity between baryons and
dark matter (the so-called streaming velocity) significantly affects star
formation in low-mass objects. Streaming substantially reduces the abundance of
low-mass gas objects while simultaneously allowing for the formation of
supersonically-induced gas objects (SIGOs) and their associated star clusters
outside of dark matter halos. Here, we present a study of the population-level
effects of streaming on star formation within both halos and SIGOs in a set of
simulations with and without streaming. Notably, we find that streaming
actually enhances star formation within individual halos of all masses at
redshifts between $z=12$ and $z=20$. This is demonstrated both as an increased
star formation rate per object as well as an enhancement of the
Kennicutt-Schmidt relation for objects with streaming. We find that our
simulations are consistent with some observations at high redshift, but on a
population level, they continue to under-predict star formation relative to the
majority of observations. Notably, our simulations do not include feedback, and
so can be taken as an upper limit on the star formation rate, exacerbating
these differences. However, simulations of overdense regions (both with and
without streaming) agree with observations, suggesting a strategy for
extracting information about the overdensity and streaming velocity in a given
survey volume in future observations.

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