The merger rates and mass assembly histories of dark matter haloes in the two Millennium simulations

By Onsi Fakhouri, Chung-Pei Ma, M. Boylan-Kolchin. 2010

484 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We construct merger trees of dark matter haloes and quantify their merger rates and mass growth rates using the joint data set from the Millennium and Millennium-II simulations. The finer resolution of the Millennium-II simulation has allowed us to extend our earlier analysis of halo merger statistics to an unprecedentedly wide range of descendant halo mass (10 10 ≲ M 0 ≲ 10 15 M ⊙ ), progenitor mass ratio (10 -5 ≲ ξ ≤ 1) and redshift (0 ≤ z ≲ 15). We update our earlier fitting form for the mean merger rate per halo as a function of M 0 , ξ and z. The overall behaviour of this quantity is unchanged: the rate per unit redshift is nearly independent of z out to z ~ 15; the dependence on halo mass is weak (∝ Mg 0.13 0 ); and it is nearly a power law in the progenitor mass ratio (∝ ξ -2 ). We also present a simple and accurate fitting formula for the mean mass growth rate of haloes as a function of mass and redshift. This mean rate is 46 M ⊙ yr -1 for 10 12 M ⊙ haloes at z = 0, and it increases with mass as ∝ M 1.1 and with redshift as (1 + z) 2.5 (for z ≳ 1). When the fit for the mean mass growth rate is integrated over a halo's history, we find excellent match to the mean mass assembly histories of the simulated haloes. By combining merger rates and mass assembly histories, we present results for the number of mergers over a halo's history and the statistics of the redshift of the last major merger.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6fa2c947d4a8cb210102749697535683dbf619f9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. L. Hernquist
3. Volker Springel
4. R. Somerville
5. R. Dav'e
6. C. Conroy
7. Thomas J. Cox
8. D. Keres̆

In Instrumentation

1. P. Hopkins
2. L. Hernquist
3. R. Somerville
4. Volker Springel
5. Thomas J. Cox
6. A. Benson
7. R. Dav'e
8. C. Conroy

Citations in the corpus

• THE AVERAGE STAR FORMATION HISTORIES OF GALAXIES IN DARK MATTER HALOS FROM z = 0–8 (2012, background): “While there have been many studies of the rate at which halos become subhalos (see, e.g., Fakhouri et al. 2010) in dark matter simulations, these studies are less relevant to our work because it is expected that satellite galaxies should last at least as long as the correspondingsubhalo that hosts…”
• GRAVITATIONALLY CONSISTENT HALO CATALOGS AND MERGER TREES FOR PRECISION COSMOLOGY (2011, background): “…al. 1999), to creating merger trees based on the trajectories of a fraction of the most-bound particles (e.g., Cole et al. 2008; Harker et al. 2006; Okamoto & Habe 2000), and more complicated continuous weighting metrics (e.g., Fakhouri et al. 2010; De Lucia & Blaizot 2007; Springel et al. 2005).”
• A BARYONIC SOLUTION TO THE MISSING SATELLITES PROBLEM (2012, background): “It has been shown that the number of subhalos at a given mass scales with host mass, since the mass assembly of DM halos is self-similar (Stewart et al. 2008; Fakhouri et al. 2010).”
• THE UNIVERSAL RELATION OF GALACTIC CHEMICAL EVOLUTION: THE ORIGIN OF THE MASS–METALLICITY RELATION (2014, unknown): “This scaling with redshift is similar to the (1 + z)2.5 scaling of the growth rate of dark matter halos in simulations (Fakhouri et al. 2010).”
• Modeling the Radio Background from the First Black Holes at Cosmic Dawn: Implications for the 21 cm Absorption Amplitude (2018, methodology): “We compute the accretion rate of halos at each time step using the fitting formula of Fakhouri et al. (2010), = +- ⎛ ⎝⎜ ⎞ ⎠⎟ ˙ ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) M M M M z H z H46.”
• THE MAJOR AND MINOR GALAXY MERGER RATES AT z < 1.5 (2011, background): “The dark matter merger rate scales with mass and mass ratio (Fakhouri & Ma 2008; Fakhouri et al. 2010).”
• THIRD-EPOCH MAGELLANIC CLOUD PROPER MOTIONS. I. HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE/WFC3 DATA AND ORBIT IMPLICATIONS (2013, methodology): “We model the mass evolution following the mean mass growth rate with redshift from Fakhouri et al. (2010).”
• Evidence for Significant Growth in the Stellar Mass of Brightest Cluster Galaxies over the Past 10 Billion Years (2012, methodology): “The second mass extrapolates the first mass to the current epoch by integrating the mean mass accretion rates in Fakhouri et al. (2010).”
• The chosen few: the low-mass haloes that host faint galaxies (2014, background): “While the total population of halos shows only a weak dependence of formation redshift on mass (in agreement with Fakhouri et al. 2010), the sub-populations of lumi- nous and non-luminous halos both show a strong massdependence, with lower mass halos forming earlier.”
• The LABOCA survey of the Extended Chandra Deep Field-South: clustering of submillimetre galaxies (2011, methodology): “…∝ nhalo(Mthresh, z)Ṁhalo(Mthresh, z)tSMG dV dz , (9) where nhalo and Ṁhalo are the number density (e.g. Tinker et al. 2008) and typical growth rate (Fakhouri et al. 2010), respectively, of haloes of mass Mthresh at redshift z, tSMG is the SMG lifetime and dV/dz is the differential comoving…”
• A mature cluster with X-ray emission at z = 2.07 (2010, background): “Based on the mass assembly histories of halos in the Millennium and Millennium-II simulations (Fakhouri et al. 2010), we estimate that CL J1449+0856 would reach a mass of 0.9−1.5×1014 M⊙ atz = 1.5 and 4.9−8.2×1014 atz = 0.”
• Galaxy formation theory (2010, methodology): “…utilizing N-body simulations have lead to the development of an empirical understanding of halo formation histories (Wechsler et al., 2002; van den Bosch, 2002) and halo–halo merger rates (Fakhouri and Ma, 2008a, 2009; Stewart et al., 2009; Fakhouri et al., 2010; Hopkins et al., 2010).”