Galaxy growth in the concordance ΛCDM cosmology

By Qi Guo, Simon D. M. White. 2007

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We use galaxy and dark halo data from the public database for the Millennium Simulation to study the growth of galaxies in the De Lucia et al. model for galaxy formation. Previous work has shown this model to reproduce many aspects of the systematic properties and the clustering of real galaxies, both in the nearby universe and at high redshift. It assumes the stellar masses of galaxies to increase through three processes, major mergers, the accretion of smaller satellite systems and star formation. We show the relative importance of these three modes to be a strong function of stellar mass and redshift. Galaxy growth through major mergers depends strongly on stellar mass, but only weakly on redshift. Except for massive systems, minor mergers contribute more to galaxy growth than major mergers at all redshifts and stellar masses. For galaxies significantly less massive than the Milky Way, star formation dominates the growth at all epochs. For galaxies significantly more massive than the Milky Way, growth through mergers is the dominant process at all epochs. At a stellar mass of 6 x 10 10 M ⊙ , about that of the Milk Way, star formation dominates at z > 1 and mergers at later times. At every stellar mass, the growth rates through star formation increase rapidly with increasing redshift. Specific star formation rates are the decreasing function of stellar mass not only at z = 0 but also at all higher redshifts. For comparison, we carry out a similar analysis of the growth of dark matter haloes. In contrast to the galaxies, growth rates depend strongly on redshift, but only weakly on mass. They agree qualitatively with analytic predictions for halo growth.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91ef59fd05f89309c4146978b44e59dcc689a6e5

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Citations in the corpus

There's no place like home? Statistics of Milky Way-mass dark matter haloes (2009, result): “Fakhouri & Ma (2008), Guo & White (2008), and Genel et al. (2009) investigated the halo merger rate directly in the MS, while Neistein & Dekel (2008) and Cole et al. (2008) used extended Press-Schechter theory to derive merger rates and compared the results to the MS.”
Bimodal gas accretion in the Horizon–MareNostrum galaxy formation simulation (2008, result): “This evolution is very similar to that reported in Kereš et al. (2005); Rasera & Teyssier (2006); Guo & White (2007); Neistein & Dekel (2008), in trend and normalization.”
A synthesis model for AGN evolution: supermassive black holes growth and feedback modes (2008, background): “…2002), due to the large uncertainties in both merging rates of galaxies (either t eoretically or observationally, see e.g. Bundy, Treu & Ellis 2007; Guo and White 2008; Hopkins et al. 2008 and references therein) and in the physical processes involved in the merger of the two nuclear black holes…”
From Rings to Bulges: Evidence for Rapid Secular Galaxy Evolution at z ~ 2 from Integral Field Spectroscopy in the SINS Survey (2008, background): “…smooth accretion of gas and/or minor mergers dominate high-z star formation, while the overall mass assembly of galaxies, and especially the most massive ones, is dominated by mergers (Bower et al. 2006; Kitzbichler &White 2007; Naab et al. 2007; Guo & White 2008; Davé 2008; Genel et al. 2008).”
THE GROWTH OF MASSIVE GALAXIES SINCE z = 2 (2009, background): “High mass galaxies tend to merge with lower mass galaxies (see, e.g., Maller et al. 2006; Brown et al. 2007; Guo & White 2008, and Appendix A), which means that their number density remains roughly constant while their mass grows.”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “This robust trend is also found in abundance matching estimates (Section 1.6) and semi-analytical galaxy formation models (Guo & White 2008, Khochfar & Silk 2006) and it is strongest for central galaxies in galaxy clusters (De Lucia & Blaizot 2007, Ostriker & Hausman 1977).”
The stellar mass assembly of galaxies in the Illustris simulation: growth by mergers and the spatial distribution of accreted stars (2015, background): “…that the stellar mass accretion rate is closely related to the galaxy-galaxy merger rate, these contrasting trends originate from the analogous qualitative differences found in the galaxy-galaxy merger rates from Guo & White (2008) and Rodriguez-Gomez et al. (2015), as discussed in the latter work.”
The star formation main sequence and stellar mass assembly of galaxies in the Illustris simulation (2014, result): “Damen et al. (2009) compared the growth rate of galaxies in observations with semi-analytical models (Guo & White 2008) and argued that a time-varying IMF cannot resolve the issue of too low normalisations at 1 . z .”
AGN-driven quenching of star formation: morphological and dynamical implications for early-type galaxies (2013, background): “…(e.g. Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2006; Khochfar & Silk 2006b; Maller et al. 2006; Naab et al. 2006, 2007; Bournaud et al. 2007; De Lucia & Blaizot 2007; Guo & White 2008; Hopkins et al. 2009; Nipoti et al. 2009; Feldmann et al. 2010; Shankar et al. 2013, and references therein), the role of the…”
THE COSMOLOGICAL SIZE AND VELOCITY DISPERSION EVOLUTION OF MASSIVE EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2011, background): “…and the subsequent growth by stellar mergers is in agreement with predictions from semianalytical models (Kauffmann 1996; Khochfar & Silk 2006a; De Lucia et al. 2006; De Lucia & Blaizot 2007; Guo & White 2008; Shankar et al. 2010a,b) and the assembly scenario discussed in Kormendy et al. (2009).”