The formation history of elliptical galaxies

By G. Lucia, Volker Springel, Simon D. M. White, Darren Croton, G. Kauffmann. 2005

811 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We take advantage of the largest high-resolution simulation of cosmic structure growth ever carried out - the Millennium Simulation of the concordancecold dark matter (CDM) cosmogony - to study how the star formation histories, ages and metallicities of elliptical galaxies depend on environment and on stellar mass. We concentrate on a galaxy formation model which is tuned to fit the joint luminosity/colour/morphology distribution of low-redshift galaxies. Massive ellipticals in this model have higher metal abundances, older luminosity- weighted ages and shorter star formation time-scales, but lower assembly redshifts, than less massive systems. Within clusters the typical masses, ages and metal abundances of ellipticals are predicted to decrease, on average, with increasing distance from the cluster centre. We also quantify the effective number of progenitors of ellipticals as a function of present stellar mass, finding typical numbers below two for M∗ < 10 11 M� , rising to approximately five for the most massive systems. These findings are consistent with recent observational results that suggest 'down-sizing' or 'antihierarchical' behaviour for the star formation history of the elliptical galaxy population, despite the fact that our model includes all the standard elements of hierarchical galaxy formation and is implemented on the standard, � CDM cosmogony.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cde2c95603c28233e3ac0d897ccbe7a9a36f3a4b

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Citations in the corpus

Systematic variation of the stellar initial mass function with velocity dispersion in early-type galaxies (2012, background): “…formation, whereby massive galaxies are supposed to grow mainly through the merging of smaller systems, with the growth ratelimited by cosmology (see, e.g., De Lucia et al. 2006), requiring alternative channels of massive galaxy formation, such as cold accretion (see, e.g. Birnboim & Dekel 2003).”
Intracluster stars in simulations with active galactic nucleus feedback (2010, methodology): “However, using semi-analytic galaxy formation models, De Lucia et al. (2006) have shown that AGN feedback allows reproducing this behaviour in a ΛCDM cosmology where structure forms hierarchically.”
Unveiling Obscured Accretion in the Chandra Deep Field-South (2007, background): “…(Hasinger 2003, 2005, Fiore et al. 2003, Ueda et al. 2003, La Franca et al. 2005, Brandt & Hasinger 2005, Bongiorno et al. 2007), a bimodal behavior recalling the evolution of star-forming galaxies and that of massive spheroids (Cowie et al. 1996, Franceschini et al. 1999, De Lucia et al. 2006).”
Spatially resolved spectroscopy of early-type galaxies over a range in mass (2007, background): “…clustering models within a Λdominated Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) cosmology, the massive early-type galaxies seen now are expected to have formed through the merger of smaller galaxies over time (e.g. c© 2006 RAS White & Frenk 1991; Somerville & Primack 1999; Cole et al. 2000; de Lucia et al. 2006).”
The dark nemesis of galaxy formation : why hot haloes trigger black hole growth and bring star formation to an end (2016, background): “…grow through star formation, doubling their stellar mass on a timescale comparable to the age of the Universe; above the transition mass, galaxy growth slows and is driven primarily by galaxy mergers (eg., De Lucia et al. 2006; Parry et al. 2009; Qu et al. 2016; Rodriguez-Gomez et al. 2016).”
A fundamental problem in our understanding of low-mass galaxy evolution (2012, methodology): “This is due both to the inclusion of AGN feedback in the models (e.g. Di Matteo et al. 2005, Bower et al. 2006, ⋆ E-mail:weinmann@strw.leidenuniv.nl Croton et al. 2006; De Lucia et al. 2006), and a better understanding of the assembly history of massive galaxies (e.g. Neistein et al. 2006).”
Simulations of the galaxy population constrained by observations from z = 3 to the present day: implications for galactic winds and the fate of their ejecta (2012, background): “The massive galaxies do form most of their stars at high redshift (e.g. De Lucia et al. 2006) so their overly blue colours most likely reflect a metallicity which is too low.”
The large-scale structure of the Universe (2006, background): “as well as the observed galaxy luminosity functions, the observationally inferred formation histories of elliptical galaxies, and the bimodal colour-magnitude distribution observed for galaxie”
Mass downsizing and ``top-down'' assembly of early-type galaxies (2006, methodology): “…in star formation may be a natural expectation in a hierarchical galaxy formationscenario, provided that a suitable mechanism is found to quench star formation at earlier times in more massive galaxies (e.g., Granato et al. 2004; De Lucia et al. 2006; Rasera & Teyssier 2006; Bower et al. 2005).”
Stellar Population Diagnostics of Elliptical Galaxy Formation (2006, methodology): “…the evidence for down-sizing and for the anticorrelation of mass and SFR. Theoretical models based on the CDM paradigm have recently incorporated these observational constraints, and have been tuned to successfully reproduce the down-sizing effect in star formation (e.g., De Lucia et al. 2006).”
The Origin of Dwarf Ellipticals in the Virgo Cluster (2008, methodology): “For comparison with De Lucia et al (2006), we give in Table 6 the lookback time when 50% and 80% of the stars were formed for a model galaxy of VC = 55 km s −1 for a (or two) ram pressure stripping event of efficiency ǫ0 = 1.2 M⊙ kpc −2 yr−1.”
The first and second data releases of the Kilo-Degree Survey (2015, background): “Galaxies are the building blocks of the Universe and within the framework of hierarchical structure formation they form bottomup, with smaller objects forming first, then merging into massive structures (e.g. De Lucia et al. 2006; Trujillo et al. 2006).”
The case for AGN feedback in galaxy groups (2009, result): “On a qualitative level, our results confirm the findings of De Lucia et al. (2006), who used a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation to show that the inclusion of a prescription of AGN feedback (see Croton et al. 2006) results in much older formation ages for massive elliptical galaxies.”
Cosmic X-ray surveys of distant active galaxies (2015, background): “3.5 The environmental dependence of AGN evolution Theoretical models of structure formation predict that galaxy growth is environmentally dependent (i.e., it is accelerated in high-density regions; e.g., Kauffmann 1996; De Lucia et al 2006).”
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).”
The SWIRE-VVDS-CFHTLS surveys: stellar mass assembly over the last 10 Gyr. Evidence for a major build up of the red sequence between z = 2 and z = 1 (2007, background): “For instance, to reproduce the properties of local massive elliptical galaxies, de Lucia et al. (2006) show that the stars could form first at high redshift in sub-galactic units, while the galaxies would continue their stellar mass assembly through merging onto low redshift.”
THE GREATER IMPACT OF MERGERS ON THE GROWTH OF MASSIVE GALAXIES: IMPLICATIONS FOR MASS ASSEMBLY AND EVOLUTION SINCE z ≃ 1 (2009, background): “…prescriptions have moved closer to reproducing top-down behavior within the hierarchical framework (Croton et al. 2006; Bower et al. 2006; De Lucia et al. 2006; Cattaneo et al. 2008; Stringer et al. 2008), it has not been observationally possible to verify the CDM prediction that via…”
Strong-lensing optical depths in a ΛCDM universe – II. The influence of the stellar mass in galaxies (2007, methodology): “…I to include the gravitational effects of the stars in galaxies, as inferred from semi-analytic galaxy-formation models implemented within the evolving dark-matter distribution of the Millennium Simulation (Springel et al. 2005; Croton et al. 2006; De Lucia et al. 2006; De Lucia and Blaizot 2007).”