Metal Cooling in Simulations of Cosmic Structure Formation

Understand

The addition of metals to any gas can significantly alter its evolution by increasing the rate of radiative cooling.

• In star-forming environments, enhanced cooling can potentially lead to fragmentation and the formation of low-mass stars, where metal-free gas-clouds have been shown not to fragment.
• Adding metal cooling to numerical simulations has traditionally required a choice between speed and accuracy.
• We introduce a method that uses the sophisticated chemical network of the photoionization software, Cloudy, to include radiative cooling from a complete set of metals up to atomic number 30 (Zn) that can be used with large-scale three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations.