The impact of feedback on the evolution of gas density profiles from galaxies to clusters: a universal fitting formula from the Simba suite of simulations

Abstract

The radial distribution of gas within galactic haloes is connected to the star formation rate and the nature of baryon-driven feedback processes. Using six variants of the hydrodynamic simulation Simba, we study the impact of different stellar/AGN feedback prescriptions on the gas density profiles of haloes in the total mass range $10^{11} \, \mathrm{M}_{\odot} < M_{\mathrm{200c}} < 10^{14} \, \mathrm{M}_{\odot}$ and redshift interval $0<z<4$. We find that the radial profiles are well represented by a power law and that, for a fixed total halo mass, the slope and amplitude of such power law are generally weakly dependent on redshift. Once AGN-driven jets are activated in the simulation, the gas density profile of haloes with $M_{\rm 200c} \gtrsim 10^{13} \, \rm M_{\odot}$ declines more gently with radial distance. We argue that this distinctive feature could be exploited with current observations to discriminate amongst the predictions of the different feedback models. We introduce a universal fitting formula for the slope and amplitude of the gas density profile as a function of total halo mass and redshift. The best-fit functions are suitable for all feedback variants considered, and their predictions are in excellent agreement with the numerical results. We provide the values of all fit parameters, making our fitting formula a versatile tool to mimic the effect of Simba feedback models onto N-body simulations and semi-analytical models of galaxy formation. Our results can also aid observational estimates of the gas mass within haloes that assume a specific slope for the underlying gas density profile.