FOGGIE. X. Characterizing the Small-scale Structure of the Circumgalactic Medium and Its Imprint on Observables

Abstract One of the main unknowns in galaxy evolution is how gas flows into and out of galaxies in the circumgalactic medium (CGM). Studies observing the CGM in absorption using multiple or extended background objects suggest a high degree of variation on relatively small (≲1 kpc) spatial scales. Similarly, high-resolution simulations generally exhibit small-scale substructure in the gas around galaxies. We examine the small-scale structure of the z = 1 CGM using simulations from the Figuring Out Gas and Galaxies in Enzo (FOGGIE) project. We select gaseous substructures (“clumps”) by their local overdensity and investigate their physical properties, including temperature, metallicity, and kinematics with respect to the galaxy and the nearby surroundings. FOGGIE resolves clumps down to sphericalized radii R ∼ 0.25 kpc at z = 1. The distribution of clumps peaks at ∼10 5 M ⊙ and 10 4 K, consistent with relatively condensed, cool gas with a slight preference for inflow-like velocities. Many clumps show internal temperature and density variations, and thus internally varying ionization levels for key diagnostic ions such as H i , Mg ii , and O vi . The average metallicity in clumps is about a factor 1.5–2× lower in metallicity than nearby gas, suggesting that the metals are not well mixed between structured and diffuse CGMs, which may have implications for observational metallicity estimations of dense CGM clouds. We estimate the survivability of CGM clumps and find that structures larger than 0.5 kpc are generally long-lived. Finally, we qualitatively compare the simulated cloud properties to Milky Way high-velocity clouds.