Cosmic-ray Driven Outflows in Global Galaxy Disk Models

Understand

Galactic-scale winds are a generic feature of massive galaxies with high star formation rates across a broad range of redshifts.

• Despite their importance, a detailed physical understanding of what drives these mass-loaded global flows has remained elusive.
• In this paper, we explore the dynamical impact of cosmic rays by performing the first three-dimensional, adaptive mesh refinement simulations of an isolated starbursting galaxy that includes a basic model for the production, dynamics and diffusion of galactic cosmic rays.
• We find that including cosmic rays naturally leads to robust, massive, bipolar outflows from our 10^12 Msun halo, with a mass-loading factor Mout/SFR = 0.3 for our fiducial run.