Semianalytical Model of Galaxy Formation with High-Resolution N-Body Simulations

By X. Kang, Yipeng Jing, H. Mo, G. Börner. 2004

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We model the galaxy formation in a series of high-resolution N-body simulations using the semianalytical approach. Unlike many earlier investigations based on semianalytical models, we make use of the subhalos resolved in the N-body simulations to follow the mergers of galaxies in dark halos, and we show that this is pivotal in modeling correctly the galaxy luminosity function at the bright end and the bimodal nature of galaxy color distribution. Mergers of galaxies based on subhalos also result in many more bright red galaxies at high z. The semianalytical model we adopt is similar to those used in earlier semianalytical studies, except that we consider the effect of a prolonged cooling in small halos and that we explicitly follow the chemical enrichment in the interstellar medium. We use our model to make predictions for the properties of the galaxy population at low redshift and compare them with various current observations. We find that our model predictions can match the luminosity functions of galaxies in various wavebands redder than the u band. The shape of the luminosity function at the bright end is well reproduced if galaxy mergers are modeled with the merger trees of subhalos, and the steep faint-end slope can be moderated if the gas cooling time in low-mass halos is comparable to the age of the universe. The model with subhalos resolved can reproduce the main features in the observed color bimodal distribution, although it still predicts too many bright blue galaxies. The same model can also match the color-magnitude relation for elliptical galaxies in clusters, the metallicity-luminosity relation and metallicity-rotation velocity relation of spiral galaxies, and the gas fraction in present-day spiral galaxies. We also identify areas where further improvements of the model are required.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c35cb3d5cb01ddbe77b429d3b01b1458e31bf7b3

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Citations in the corpus

Galaxy growth in the concordance ΛCDM cosmology (2007, background): “…the merging trees can taken directly from the simulation itself, thereby allowing the evolution of the galaxy population to be followed in a single consistent simulation (Kauffmann et al. 1999; Springel et al. 2001; Helly et al. 2003; Hatton et al. 2003; Springel et al. 2005b; Kang et al. 2005).”
Dark Matter Substructure in Numerical Simulations: A Tale of Discreteness Noise, Runaway Instabilities, and Artificial Disruption (2018, background): “…for informing and facilitating a more accurate modeling of ‘orphan galaxies’ in semianalytical models of galaxy formation (e.g., Springel et al. 2001; Kang et al. 2005; Kitzbichler & White 2008), subhalo abundance matching models (e.g., Conroy et al. 2006; Guo & White 2013; Campbell et al. 2017)…”
Luminosity function and radial distribution of Milky Way satellites in a ΛCDM Universe (2009, methodology): “We will consider predictions from the most recent implementations of three different SAMs, developed independently by different groups: (i) the Kang et al. (2005) model that has been recently updated in Kang (2008, K08 hereafter); (ii) the fiducial model of Somerville et al. (2008, S08 hereafter),…”
Mapping stellar content to dark matter haloes using galaxy clustering and galaxy–galaxy lensing in the SDSS DR7 (2015, background): “…Springel et al. 2005; Di Matteo et al. 2005; Oppenheimer & Davé 2006; Booth & Schaye 2009; Vogelsberger et al. 2013) or semi-analytical models (SAMs) along the halo merger trees of N-body simulations (Baugh 2006; Somerville et al. 2008; Kang et al. 2005; Bower et al. 2006; De Lucia et al. 2006).”
First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: the galaxy colour bimodality (2017, methodology): “Specifically, models which introduced a central heating process from a supermassive blackhole were then able to recover the red colors of the most massive galaxies (Kang et al. 2005; Menci et al. 2005; Croton et al. 2006; Cattaneo et al. 2007).”
EMERGE – an empirical model for the formation of galaxies since z ∼ 10 (2017, background): “…from the dark-matterdominated growth of structure by post-processing halo merger trees with a series of physically motivated recipes (White & Frenk 1991; Kauffmann,White &Guiderdoni 1993; Cole et al. 1994; Somerville & Primack 1999; Kang et al. 2005; Monaco, Fontanot & Taffoni 2007; Benson 2012).”