The Formation and Survival of Discs in a Lambda-CDM Universe

Understand

We study the formation of galaxies in a Lambda-CDM Universe using high resolution hydrodynamical simulations with a multiphase treatment of gas, cooling and feedback, focusing on the formation of discs.

• Our simulations follow eight haloes similar in mass to the Milky Way and extracted from a large cosmological simulation without restriction on spin parameter or merger history.
• This allows us to investigate how the final properties of the simulated galaxies correlate with the formation histories of their haloes.
• We find that, at z = 0, none of our galaxies contain a disc with more than 20 per cent of its total stellar mass.