Role of cosmic rays in the early stages of galactic outflows

Abstract

Using an idealized set-up, we investigate the dynamical role of cosmic rays (CRs) in the early stages of galactic outflows for galaxies of halo masses \(10^{8}\), \(10^{11}\) and \(10^{12}\) \(M_\odot\). The outflow is launched from a central region in the galactic disk where we consider three different constant star formation rates (\(0.1\), \(1\), and \(10\) \(M_{\odot}\) yr\(^{-1}\)) over a dynamical timescale of \(50\) Myr. We determine the temperature distribution of the gas and find that CRs can reduce the temperature of the shocked gas, which is consistent with previous results. However, we show that CRs do not have any noticeable effect on the mass loading by the outflow. We find that CRs can reduce the size of the outflow, which contradicts previous claims of efficient dynamical impact of CRs; however, it is consistent with earlier theoretical models of cosmic ray driven blastwave as well as stellar wind. We discuss the dependence of our results on CR injection prescriptions and compare them with earlier studies. We conclude that in the early stages of galactic outflows the dynamical role of CRs is not important.