How sensitive are predicted galaxy luminosities to the choice of stellar population synthesis model

By V. Gonzalez-Perez, C. Lacey, C. Baugh, C. Lagos, John C. Helly, D. Campbell, Peter D Mitchell. 2013

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a new release of the GALFORM semi-analytical model of galaxy formation and evolution, which exploits a Millennium Simulation-class N-body run performed with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 7 cosmology. We use this new model to study the impact of the choice of stellar population synthesis (SPS) model on the predicted evolution of the galaxy luminosity function. The semi-analytical model is run using seven different SPS models. In each case, we obtain the rest-frame luminosity function in the far-ultraviolet, optical and near-infrared (NIR) wavelength ranges. We find that both the predicted rest-frame ultraviolet and optical luminosity function are insensitive to the choice of SPS model. However, we find that the predicted evolution of the rest-frame NIR luminosity function depends strongly on the treatment of the thermally pulsating asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB) stellar phase in the SPS models, with differences larger than a factor of 2 for model galaxies brighter than MAB(K) − 5 log h < −22 (∼L* for 0 ≤ z ≤ 1.5). We have also explored the predicted number counts of galaxies, finding remarkable agreement between the results with different choices of SPS model, except when selecting galaxies with very red optical–NIR colours. The predicted number counts of these extremely red galaxies appear to be more affected by the treatment of star formation in discs than by the treatment of TP-AGB stars in the SPS models.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/46e82b2aa9073442b49358174f238fac6d1da356

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Citations in the corpus

A unified multiwavelength model of galaxy formation (2015, methodology): “The conversion factors for SFR are given in Table B2, and were calculated as in Gonzalez-Perez et al. (2014), using the PEGASE.2 SPS model to calculate for different IMFs the luminosty at different wavelengths of a galaxy of Solar metallicity and age 100Myr forming stars at a constant rate.”
Modelling and interpreting spectral energy distributions of galaxies with BEAGLE (2016, background): “This progress has led to a general consensus about the main physical ingredients required to describe the evolution of the galaxy population (e.g. Gonzalez-Perez et al. 2014; Lu et al. 2014; Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Henriques et al. 2015; Schaye et al. 2015): collapse and hierarchical growth of…”
Colours and luminosities of z = 0.1 galaxies in the eagle simulation (2015, background): “…star formation and BHs together shape the GSMF is energetically plausible, and semi-analytical models (e.g. Cole et al. 2000; Henriques et al. 2013; Gonzalez-Perez et al. 2014; Porter et al. 2014) and numerical simulations (e.g. Oppenheimer et al. 2010; Puchwein & Springel 2013; Vogelsberger et…”
THE EVOLUTION OF GALAXY NUMBER DENSITY AT z < 8 AND ITS IMPLICATIONS (2016, background): “Furthermore these theoretical models show that there are indeed galaxies down to these low masses, both through dark matter halos and through simulated galaxies (e.g., Jenkins et al. 2001; Gonzalez-Perez et al. 2014; Henriques et al. 2015).”
Cold gas stripping in satellite galaxies: from pairs to clusters (2016, methodology): “For our comparison, we choose one cosmological model from each camp; the semi-analytic model GALFORM (Gonzalez-Perez et al. 2014) and the hydrodynamic simulations of Davé et al. (2013), both have previously published successful comparisons with observational H I scaling relations (see Lagos et al. ”
Physical Models of Galaxy Formation in a Cosmological Framework (2014, background): “The GALFORM SAMs assume that when a disk becomes unstable, all of the stars and gas in the disk are moved to a spheroid component.”