Cosmological simulations of the formation of the stellar haloes around disc galaxies

Understand

We use the Galaxies-Intergalactic Medium Interaction Calculation (GIMIC) suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to study the formation of stellar spheroids of Milky Way-mass disc galaxies.

• The simulations contain accurate treatments of metal-dependent radiative cooling, star formation, supernova feedback, and chemodynamics, and the large volumes that have been simulated yield an unprecedentedly large sample of ~400 simulated L_* disc galaxies.
• The simulated galaxies are surrounded by low-mass, low-surface brightness stellar haloes that extend out to ~100 kpc and beyond.
• The diffuse stellar distributions bear a remarkable resemblance to those observed around the Milky Way, M31 and other nearby galaxies, in terms of mass density, surface brightness, and metallicity profiles.