Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userFrom Stellar Halos to Intracluster Light: the physics of the Intra-Halo Stellar Component in cosmological hydrodynamical simulations
106
0
0.0
(
0
)
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
We study the Intra-Halo Stellar Component (IHSC) of Milky Way-mass systems up to galaxy clusters in the Horizon-AGN cosmological hydrodynamical simulation. We identify the IHSC using an improved phase-space galaxy finder algorithm which provides an adaptive, physically motivated and shape-independent definition of this stellar component, that can be applied to halos of arbitrary masses. We explore the IHSC mass fraction-total halos stellar mass, $f_{M*,IHSC}-M*$, relation and the physical drivers of its scatter. We find that on average the $f_{M*,IHSC}$ increases with $M_{*,tot}$, with the scatter decreasing strongly with mass from 2 dex at $M_{*,tot}sim10^{11}M_odot$ to 0.3 dex at group masses. At high masses, $M_{*,tot}>10^{11.5}M_odot$, $f_{M*,IHSC}$ increases with the number of substructures, and with the mass ratio between the central galaxy and largest satellite, at fixed $M_{*,tot}$. From mid-size groups and systems below $M_{*,tot}<10^{12}M_odot$, we find that the central galaxys stellar rotation-to-dispersion velocity ratio, V/{sigma}, displays the strongest (anti)-correlation with $f_{M*,IHSC}$ at fixed $M_{*,tot}$ of all the galaxy and halo properties explored, transitioning from $f_{M*,IHSC}$<0.1% for high V/{sigma}, to $f_{M*,IHSC}sim5$% for low V/{sigma} galaxies. By studying the $f_{M*,IHSC}$ temporal evolution, we find that, in the former, mergers not always take place, but if they did, they happened early (z>1), while the high $f_{M*,IHSC}$ population displays a much more active merger history. In the case of massive groups and galaxy clusters, $M_{*,tot}>10^{12}M_odot$, a fraction $f_{M*,IHSC}sim$10-20% is reached at $zsim1$ and then they evolve across lines of constant $f_{M*,IHSC}$ modulo some small perturbations. Because of the limited simulations volume, the latter is only tentative and requires a larger sample of simulated galaxy clusters to confirm.
rate research
Read More
We explored the role of X-ray binaries composed by a black hole and a massive stellar companion (BHXs) as sources of kinetic feedback by using hydrodynamical cosmological simulations. Following previous results, our BHX model selects low metal-poor stars ($Z = [0,10^{-4}]$) as possible progenitors. The model that better reproduces observations assumes that a $sim 20%$ fraction of low-metallicity black holes are in binary systems which produce BHXs. These sources are estimated to deposit $sim 10^{52}$ erg of kinetic energy per event. With these parameters and in the simulated volume, we find that the energy injected by BHXs represents $sim 30%$ of the total energy released by SNII and BHX events at redshift $zsim7$ and then decreases rapidly as baryons get chemically enriched. Haloes with virial masses smaller than $sim 10^{10} ,M_{odot}$ (or $T_{rm vir} lesssim 10^5 $ K) are the most directly affected ones by BHX feedback. These haloes host galaxies with stellar masses in the range $10^7 - 10^8$ M$_odot$. Our results show that BHX feedback is able to keep the interstellar medium warm, without removing a significant gas fraction, in agreement with previous analytical calculations. Consequently, the stellar-to-dark matter mass ratio is better reproduced at high redshift. Our model also predicts a stronger evolution of the number of galaxies as a function of the stellar mass with redshift when BHX feedback is considered. These findings support previous claims that the BHXs could be an effective source of feedback in early stages of galaxy evolution.
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.
We examine the outskirts of galaxy clusters in the C-EAGLE simulations to quantify the `edges of the stellar and dark matter distribution. The radius of the steepest slope in the dark matter, commonly used as a proxy for the splashback radius, is located at ~r_200m; the strength and location of this feature depends on the recent mass accretion rate, in good agreement with previous work. Interestingly, the stellar distribution (or intracluster light, ICL) also has a well-defined edge, which is directly related to the splashback radius of the halo. Thus, detecting the edge of the ICL can provide an independent measure of the physical boundary of the halo, and the recent mass accretion rate. We show that these caustics can also be seen in the projected density profiles, but care must be taken to account for the influence of substructures and other non-diffuse material, which can bias and/or weaken the signal of the steepest slope. This is particularly important for the stellar material, which has a higher fraction bound in subhaloes than the dark matter. Finally, we show that the `stellar splashback feature is located beyond current observational constraints on the ICL, but these large projected distances (>> 1 Mpc) and low surface brightnesses (mu >> 32 mag/arcsec^2) can be reached with upcoming observational facilities such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and Euclid.
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 $10^{14.3} M_{odot}$.
Particle tagging is an efficient, but approximate, technique for using cosmological N-body simulations to model the phase-space evolution of the stellar populations predicted, for example, by a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation. We test the technique developed by Cooper et al. (which we call STINGS here) by comparing particle tags with stars in a smooth particle hydrodynamic (SPH) simulation. We focus on the spherically averaged density profile of stars accreted from satellite galaxies in a Milky Way (MW)-like system. The stellar profile in the SPH simulation can be recovered accurately by tagging dark matter (DM) particles in the same simulation according to a prescription based on the rank order of particle binding energy. Applying the same prescription to an N-body version of this simulation produces a density profile differing from that of the SPH simulation by <10 per cent on average between 1 and 200 kpc. This confirms that particle tagging can provide a faithful and robust approximation to a self-consistent hydrodynamical simulation in this regime (in contradiction to previous claims in the literature). We find only one systematic effect, likely due to the collisionless approximation, namely that massive satellites in the SPH simulation are disrupted somewhat earlier than their collisionless counterparts. In most cases this makes remarkably little difference to the spherically averaged distribution of their stellar debris. We conclude that, for galaxy formation models that do not predict strong baryonic effects on the present-day DM distribution of MW-like galaxies or their satellites, differences in stellar halo predictions associated with the treatment of star formation and feedback are much more important than those associated with the dynamical limitations of collisionless particle tagging.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
