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Survival of Magellanic Debris

A selection of videos accompanying Bustard and Gronke 2021
"Radiative Turbulent Mixing Layers and the Survival of Magellanic Debris"
(arxiv link to come)

Quick links to downloadable videos

Leading Arm Simulations

Leading Arm Simulations

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Trailing Stream Simulations

Trailing Stream Simulations

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Survival of the Leading Arm

  • For a Mach = 1.5 flow (above), the disrupted cloud is redistributed into a relatively short tail. By the end of the video, when the cloud has become entrained in the hot flow, the total cold gas mass has increased by over a factor of 10 (consistent with previous studies)

  • For higher Mach number flows (Mach = 3, 4.5, and 6 going left to right), the disruptive effects of the wind are more pronounced. The drag time of the cloud is progressively greater, the onset of mass growth is delayed, and the cooling tail becomes longer. Nevertheless, mass growth still occurs!

Survival of the Trailing Stream

  • We also ran a few simulations of the Trailing Stream, i.e. a cylinder of cold gas exposed to a 228 km/s shear parallel to its major axis. Here we assume the gas is at 0.3 x solar metallicity and in photoionization with the metagalactic UV background. Consistent with other work (e.g. Mandelker+ 2020), we find that Stream survival or destruction obeys the analytic criterion -- Stream sections with column densities above ~ 10^19 survive and grow! 

  • Below, we show column densities for shearing Streams well within the survival regime with N ~ 1e20 (left), marginal with N ~ 1e19 (upper right), and within the destruction regime with N ~ 3e18 (lower right)

  • Movies below show the density weighted temperature looking down the major axis of the Stream. Cold gas grows on the left, while mixing and gas heating are more apparent in the middle. The Stream on the right mixes irreversibly into the hot halo.

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