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Register a new userCreating mock catalogues of stellar haloes from cosmological simulations
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Ben Lowing
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We present a new technique for creating mock catalogues of the individual stars that make up the accreted component of stellar haloes in cosmological simulations and show how the catalogues can be used to test and interpret observational data. The catalogues are constructed from a combination of methods. A semi-analytic galaxy formation model is used to calculate the star formation history in haloes in an N-body simulation and dark matter particles are tagged with this stellar mass. The tags are converted into individual stars using a stellar population synthesis model to obtain the number density and evolutionary stage of the stars, together with a phase-space sampling method that distributes the stars while ensuring that the phase-space structure of the original N-body simulation is maintained. A set of catalogues based on the $Lambda$CDM Aquarius simulations of Milky Way mass haloes have been created and made publicly available on a website. Two example applications are discussed that demonstrate the power and flexibility of the mock catalogues. We show how the rich stellar substructure that survives in the stellar halo precludes a simple measurement of its density profile and demonstrate explicitly how pencil-beam surveys can return almost any value for the slope of the profile. We also show that localized variations in the abundance of particular types of stars, a signature of differences in the composition of stellar populations, allow streams to be easily identified.
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We introduce and apply a new approach to probe the response of galactic stellar haloes to the interplay between cosmological merger histories and galaxy formation physics. We perform dark-matter-only, zoomed simulations of two Milky Way-mass hosts and make targeted, controlled changes to their cosmological histories using the genetic modification technique. Populating each historys stellar halo with a semi-empirical, particle-tagging approach then enables a controlled study, with all instances converging to the same large-scale structure, dynamical and stellar mass at $z=0$ as their reference. These related merger scenarios alone generate an extended spread in stellar halo mass fractions (1.5 dex) comparable to the observed population. Largest scatter is achieved by growing late ($zleq1$) major mergers that spread out existing stars to create massive, in-situ dominated stellar haloes. Increasing a last major merger at $zsim2$ brings more accreted stars into the inner regions, resulting in smaller scatter in the outskirts which are predominantly built by subsequent minor events. Exploiting the flexibility of our semi-empirical approach, we show that the diversity of stellar halo masses across scenarios is reduced by allowing shallower slopes in the stellar mass--halo mass relation for dwarf galaxies, while it remains conserved when central stars are born with hotter kinematics across cosmic time. The merger-dependent diversity of stellar haloes thus responds distinctly to assumptions in modelling the central and dwarf galaxies respectively, opening exciting prospects to constrain star formation and feedback at different galactic mass-scales with the coming generation of deep, photometric observatories.
The high-precision measurement of spatial clustering of emission line galaxies (ELGs) is a primary objective for upcoming cosmological spectroscopic surveys. The source of strong emission of ELGs is nebular emission from surrounding ionized gas irradiated by massive stars and such massive short-lived stars form in star-forming galaxies. As a result, ELGs are more likely to reside in newly-formed halos and this leads to a nonlinear relation between ELG number density and matter density fields. In order to estimate the covariance matrix of cosmological observables, it is essential to produce many independent realisations to simulate ELG distributions for large survey volumes. In order to efficiently generate mock ELG catalogues, we present a novel and fast scheme to populate ELGs to dark-matter only $N$-body simulations based on local density field. This method enables fast production of mock ELG catalogues suitable for upcoming spectroscopic surveys and can populate ELGs in moderately high-density regions even though the halo structure cannot be resolved due to low resolution. The simulated ELGs are more likely to be found in filamentary structures, which is consistent with results of semi-analytic and hydrodynamical simulations. Furthermore, we address the redshift-space power spectrum of simulated ELGs. The measured multipole moments clearly exhibit a weaker Finger-of-God effect due to infalling motion towards halo centre, which is predicted by the simulations.
We study stellar property statistics, including satellite galaxy occupation, of massive halo populations realized by three cosmological hydrodynamics simulations: BAHAMAS + MACSIS, TNG300 of the IllustrisTNG suite, and Magneticum Pathfinder. The simulations incorporate independent sub-grid methods for astrophysical processes with spatial resolutions ranging from $1.5$ to $6$ kpc, and each generates samples of $1000$ or more halos with $M_{rm halo}> 10^{13.5} M_{odot}$ at redshift $z=0$. Applying localized, linear regression (LLR), we extract halo mass-conditioned statistics (normalizations, slopes, and intrinsic covariance) for a three-element stellar property vector consisting of: i) $N_{sat}$, the number of satellite galaxies with stellar mass, $M_{star, rm sat} > 10^{10} M_{odot}$ within radius $R_{200c}$ of the halo; ii) $M_{star,rm tot}$, the total stellar mass within that radius, and; iii) $M_{star,rm BCG}$, the gravitationally-bound stellar mass of the central galaxy within a $100 , rm kpc$ radius. Scaling parameters for the three properties with halo mass show mild differences among the simulations, in part due to numerical resolution, but there is qualitative agreement on property correlations, with halos having smaller than average central galaxies tending to also have smaller total stellar mass and a larger number of satellite galaxies. Marginalizing over total halo mass, we find the satellite galaxy kernel, $p(ln N_{sat},|,M_{rm halo},z)$ to be consistently skewed left, with skewness parameter $gamma = -0.91 pm 0.02$, while that of $ln M_{star,rm tot}$ is closer to log-normal, in all three simulations. The highest resolution simulations find $gamma simeq -0.8$ for the $z=0$ shape of $p(ln M_{star,rm BCG},|,M_{rm halo},z)$ and also that the fractional scatter in total stellar mass is below $10%$ in halos more massive than $10^{14.3} M_{odot}$.
We present a direct comparison of the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey (PAndAS) observations of the stellar halo of M31 with the stellar halos of 6 galaxies from the Auriga simulations. We process the simulated halos through the Auriga2PAndAS pipeline and create PAndAS-like mocks that fold in all observational limitations of the survey data (foreground contamination from the Milky Way stars, incompleteness of the stellar catalogues, photometric uncertainties, etc). This allows us to study the survey data and the mocks in the same way and generate directly comparable density maps and radial density profiles. We show that the simulations are overall compatible with the observations. Nevertheless, some systematic differences exist, such as a preponderance for metal-rich stars in the mocks. While these differences could suggest that M31 had a different accretion history or has a different mass compared to the simulated systems, it is more likely a consequence of an under-quenching of the star formation history of galaxies, related to the resolution of the Auriga simulations. The direct comparison enabled by our approach offers avenues to improve our understanding of galaxy formation as they can help pinpoint the observable differences between observations and simulations. Ideally, this approach will be further developed through an application to other stellar halo simulations. To facilitate this step, we release the pipeline to generate the mocks, along with the six mocks presented and used in this contribution.
The splashback radius, $R_{rm sp}$, is a physically motivated halo boundary that separates infalling and collapsed matter of haloes. We study $R_{rm sp}$ in the hydrodynamic and dark matter only IllustrisTNG simulations. The most commonly adopted signature of $R_{rm sp}$ is the radius at which the radial density profiles are steepest. Therefore, we explicitly optimise our density profile fit to the profile slope and find that this leads to a $sim5%$ larger radius compared to other optimisations. We calculate $R_{rm sp}$ for haloes with masses between $10^{13-15}{rm M}_{odot}$ as a function of halo mass, accretion rate and redshift. $R_{rm sp}$ decreases with mass and with redshift for haloes of similar $M_{rm200m}$ in agreement with previous work. We also find that $R_{rm sp}/R_{rm200m}$ decreases with halo accretion rate. We apply our analysis to dark matter, gas and satellite galaxies associated with haloes to investigate the observational potential of $R_{rm sp}$. The radius of steepest slope in gas profiles is consistently smaller than the value calculated from dark matter profiles. The steepest slope in galaxy profiles, which are often used in observations, tends to agree with dark matter profiles but is lower for less massive haloes. We compare $R_{rm sp}$ in hydrodynamic and N-body dark matter only simulations and do not find a significant difference caused by the addition of baryonic physics. Thus, results from dark matter only simulations should be applicable to realistic haloes.
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