The structure of the interstellar medium of star-forming galaxies

We develop and implement numerical methods for including stellar feedback in galaxy-scale numerical simulations. Our models include simplified treatments of heating by Type I and Type II supernovae, gas recycling from young stars and asymptotic giant branch winds, heating from the shocked stellar winds, H II photoionization heating and radiation pressure from stellar photons. The energetics and time dependence associated with the feedback are taken directly from stellar evolution models. We implement these stellar feedback models in smoothed particle hydrodynamic simulations with pc-scale resolution, modelling galaxies from Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) like dwarfs and Milky Way (MW) analogues to massive z 2 star-forming discs. In the absence of stellar feedback, gas cools rapidly and collapses without limit into dense sub-units, inconsistent with observations. By contrast, in all cases with feedback, the interstellar medium (ISM) quickly approaches a statistical steady state in which giant molecular clouds (GMCs) continuously form, disperse and re-form, leading to a multiphase ISM. In this paper, we quantify the properties of the ISM and GMCs in this self-regulated state. In a companion paper we study the galactic winds driven by stellar feedback.