The many manifestations of downsizing: hierarchical galaxy formation models confront observations

By F. Fontanot, G. Lucia, P. Monaco, R. Somerville, Paola Santini Max-Planck-Institute fuer Astronomie, H. M. F. Astrophysik, G. I. A. D. T. D. Astronomia, Universita' di Trieste Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma Dipartimento Fisica, UniversitaLa Sapienza. 2009

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It has been widely claimed that several lines of observational evidence point towards a ‘downsizing’ of the process of galaxy formation over cosmic time. This behaviour is sometimes termed ‘antihierarchical’, and contrasted with the ‘bottom-up’ (small objects form first) assembly of the dark matter structures in cold dark matter (CDM) models. In this paper, we address three different kinds of observational evidence that have been described as ‘downsizing’: the stellar mass assembly (i.e. more massive galaxies assemble at higher redshift with respect to low-mass ones), star formation rate (SFR) (i.e. the decline of the specific star formation rate is faster for more massive systems) and the ages of the stellar populations in local galaxies (i.e. more massive galaxies host older stellar populations). We compare a broad compilation of available data sets with the predictions of three different semi-analytic models

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4095eb1a46a6ba5d7b41658f144b47871dd00437

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Citations in the corpus

The dependence of star formation activity on environment and stellar mass at z∼ 1 from the HiZELS-Hα survey (2010, background): “…out to z ∼ 1.5, by revealing that the most massive galaxies are undergoing very little or no star formation, or by finding a population of massive galaxies already in the red sequence (e.g. Bauer et al. 2005; Marchesini et al. 2009; Santini et al. 2009; Fontanot et al. 2009; Cirasuolo et al. 2010).”
NEW CONSTRAINTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR-TO-DARK MATTER CONNECTION: A COMBINED ANALYSIS OF GALAXY–GALAXY LENSING, CLUSTERING, AND STELLAR MASS FUNCTIONS FROM z = 0.2 to z = 1 (2011, methodology): “Since then, downsizing has been widely employed to more generally describe the behavior in which a certain parameter that regulates galaxy formation decreases with time (for recent discussions on downsizing see Fontanot et al. 2009 and Conroy & Wechsler 2009).”
THE MAJOR AND MINOR GALAXY MERGER RATES AT z < 1.5 (2011, result): “…for the galaxy stellar mass functions (assuming a Chabrier initial mass function and Bruzual & Charlot 2003 SEDs) are found to be in good agreement with these same observed measurements at z < 1.5 and for galaxies with masses above ∼ 1010M⊙ (see Fontanot et al. 2009, Kitzbichler & White 2007).”
Submillimetre galaxies in a hierarchical universe: number counts, redshift distribution, and implications for the IMF (2012, background): “However, this problem has been significantly reduced in the latest version of the model (Lo Faro et al. 2009), which provides a significantly better fit to the galaxy stellar mass function (SMF) at low redshift (Fontanot et al. 2009).”
The VISTA deep extragalactic observations (VIDEO) survey (2012, background): “…ic.oup.com /m nras/article-abstract/428/2/1281/1005391 by guest on 16 M arch 2020 downsizing in the mass function of forming galaxies, where the massive early-type galaxies appear to be in place before the less massive galaxies (e.g. Cimatti, Daddi & Renzini 2006; Fontanot et al. 2009).”
Erratum: From dwarf spheroidals to cD galaxies: simulating the galaxy population in a ΛCDM cosmology (2010, background): “…efficiencies are substantially too high at low halo mass in the DLB07 model, and slightly too high at high halo mass (see also, for example, Fontanot et al. 2009) In the following section, we revisit the DLB07 model, improving the treatment of a number of physical processes and retuning…”
The physics driving the cosmic star formation history (2009, methodology): “…have used semi-analytic models (e.g. White & Frenk 1991; Hernquist & Springel 2003; Bower et al. 2006; Croton et al. 2006; Somerville et al. 2008; Fontanot et al. 2009) or hydrodynamical simulations (e.g. Nagamine, Cen & Ostriker 2000; Pearce et al. 2001; Ascasibar et al. 2002; Murali et al.…”
Tracking the impact of environment on the galaxy stellar mass function up to z ~ 1 in the 10 k zCOSMOS sample (2009, background): “…a too efficient strangulation produces an instantaneous shut down of the star formation when a galaxy enters in a halo (see Weinmann et al. 2006; Font et al. 2008; Kang & van den Bosch 2008; Kimm et al. 2009; Fontanot et al. 2009, for a description of the issue and some attempts to solve it).”
The mean star formation rate of X-ray selected active galaxies and its evolution from z~2.5: results from PEP-Herschel (2012, background): “In addition, AGNs, like star-forming galaxies (Fontanot et al. 2009), display a form of ‘down-sizing’, by which the population that dominates either nuclear or star-forming activity moves to systems at lower luminosities or masses towards later epochs (Cowie et al. 2003; Fiore et al. 2003; Hasinger…”
TOWARD THE STANDARD POPULATION SYNTHESIS MODEL OF THE X-RAY BACKGROUND: EVOLUTION OF X-RAY LUMINOSITY AND ABSORPTION FUNCTIONS OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI INCLUDING COMPTON-THICK POPULATIONS (2014, background): “The so-called down-sizing or anti-hierarchical evolution, the trend that more massive systems formed in earlier cosmic time, has been revealed for both SMBHs (Ueda et al. 2003, U03; Hasinger et al. 2005, H05) and galaxies (e.g., Cowie et al. 1996; Kodama et al. 2004; Fontanot et al. 2009).”
REGULARITY UNDERLYING COMPLEXITY: A REDSHIFT-INDEPENDENT DESCRIPTION OF THE CONTINUOUS VARIATION OF GALAXY-SCALE MOLECULAR GAS PROPERTIES IN THE MASS-STAR FORMATION RATE PLANE (2013, unknown): “…calculation of αCO these differences compared to the 2-SFM predictions might reflect the well-known problem that both semi-analytical models (e.g., Fontanot et al. 2009) and cosmological hydrodynamical simulations (e.g., Weinmann et al. 2012) tend to produce too many stars too early in the…”
Stellar masses of SDSS-III/BOSS galaxies at z ∼ 0.5 and constraints to galaxy formation models (2012, methodology): “The blue shaded area represents a model variance as obtained by accounting for the possible scatter in modelled observations (Baugh 2006, also applied in Fontanot et al. 2009 and Kitzbichler & White 2009).”
The evolution of the dust and gas content in galaxies (2013, background): “This behaviour is consistent with a downsizing scenario (Cowie et al. 1996; Fontanot et al. 2009), where massive galaxies have already consumed most of their gas at high redshift, while less massive galaxies have a larger fraction of gas (though more complex scenarios resulting from the interplay…”
Enhanced star formation rates in AGN hosts with respect to inactive galaxies from PEP-Herschel observations (2012, methodology): “This so-calledanti-hierarchical evolution is similar to thedownsizing behaviour of galaxy SF activity (see Fontanot et al. 2009 and references therein).”
Cosmological simulations of black hole growth: AGN luminosities and downsizing (2013, background): “…antihierarchical or downsizing behaviour, with several independent observational indicators suggesting that more massive galaxies formed their stars and had their SF quenched earlier than low-mass galaxies, which continue forming stars to the present day (see Fontanot et al. 2009 for an overview).”
The environmental history of group and cluster galaxies in a Λ cold dark matter universe (2011, background): “…mass c© 2011 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–17 galaxies at all redshifts, the fraction of red galaxies among low mass galaxies is too high compared to observational data, and the model over-predicts the clustering signal of faint galaxies (e.g. Weinmann et al. 2006; Wang et al. 2008; Fontanot et al. 2009).”
UNLEASHING POSITIVE FEEDBACK: LINKING THE RATES OF STAR FORMATION, SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE ACCRETION, AND OUTFLOWS IN DISTANT GALAXIES (2013, background): “Models that fit the high-redshift mass function fail at low z (Henriques et al. 2011), and models that fit at low z fail at high z (Fontanot et al. 2009), especially for the most massive galaxies (Mutch et al. 2012).”
The evolution of massive black holes and their spins in their galactic hosts (2012, background): “…massive galaxies aredominated by old stellar populations, while low-mass galaxies generally present young stellar populations and longer-lasting star-formation activity (Cowie et al. 1996; Fontanot et al. 2009), thus suggesting that massive galaxies assemble at higher redshift than low-mass ones.”
A PUBLIC Ks-SELECTED CATALOG IN THE COSMOS/UltraVISTA FIELD: PHOTOMETRY, PHOTOMETRIC REDSHIFTS, AND STELLAR POPULATION PARAMETERS, (2013, background): “This early and rapid formation of massive galaxies is not well-reproduced in current theoretical models, where high-mass galaxies typically form much later (e.g., Fontanot et al. 2009; Guo et al. 2011; Henriques et al. 2012; Bower et al. 2012).”