Natural downsizing in hierarchical galaxy formation

By E. Neistein, F. V. D. Bosch, A. Dekel. 2006

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Stellar-population analyses of today's galaxies show 'downsizing', where the stars in more massive galaxies tend to have formed earlier and over a shorter time-span. We show that this phenomenon is not necessarily 'antihierarchical' but rather has its natural roots in the bottom-up clustering process of dark-matter haloes. While the main progenitor does indeed show an opposite effect, the integrated mass in all the progenitors down to a given minimum mass shows a robust downsizing that is qualitatively similar to what has been observed. These results are derived analytically from the standard extended Press-Schechter (EPS) theory, and are confirmed by merger trees based on EPS or drawn from N-body simulations. The downsizing is valid for any minimum mass, as long as it is the same for all haloes at any given time, but the effect is weaker for smaller minimum mass. If efficient star formation is triggered by atomic cooling, then a minimum halo mass arises naturally from the minimum virial temperature for cooling, T ≃ 10 4 K, though for such a small minimum mass the effect is weaker than observed. Baryonic feedback effects, which are expected to stretch the duration of star formation in small galaxies and shut it down in massive haloes at late epochs, are likely to play a subsequent role in shaping up the final downsizing behaviour. Other appearances of downsizing, such as the decline with time of the typical mass of star-forming galaxies, may not be attributed to the gravitational clustering process but rather arise from the gas processes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd24f4ba17e4bc554f2302d02139a060cb9dbc70

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Citations in the corpus

The VIMOS VLT deep survey: the assembly history of the stellar mass in galaxies: from the young to the old universe (2007, unknown): “…(for the inclusion of AGN feedback, see Bower et al. 2006; Kang et al. 2006; De Lucia & Blaizot 2007; Menci et al. 2006; Monaco et al. 2006; and see Neistein et al. 2006, for the description of a natural downsizing in star formation in the hierarchical galaxy formation models and a recent review…”
High-redshift clumpy discs and bulges in cosmological simulations (2009, methodology): “Using the extended Press–Schechter (EPS) statistic of halo growth (Neistein et al. 2006), the mean virial mass of the major progenitor of such haloes is expected to be 5 × 1011 M at z ∼ 2.3.”
The Hierarchical Build-Up of Massive Galaxies and the Intracluster Light since z = 1 (2007, background): “These more complex scenarios arise fairly naturally within the context of the hierarchical growth of structure in the now favored CDM cosmology (see, e.g., Baugh et al. 1996;Neistein et al. 2006).”
DISSIPATION AND EXTRA LIGHT IN GALACTIC NUCLEI. IV. EVOLUTION IN THE SCALING RELATIONS OF SPHEROIDS (2008, methodology): “The simplest approch, then, is to consider each halo in the Monte Carlo sample to have a mass at eachz > zobs given by the mean growth history (adopting the analytic fits in Neistein et al. 2006, in their Equation 11and Appendices).”
Gravitational quenching in massive galaxies and clusters by clumpy accretion (2007, methodology): “The average virial accretion rate onto haloes of mass Mv at redshift z can be estimated using the EPS formalism, following Neistein et al. (2006) and as described in Appendix A of Birnboim et al. (2007).”
There's no place like home? Statistics of Milky Way-mass dark matter haloes (2009, methodology): “…studied extensively via N -body simulations and extended Press-Schechter (1974) theory (Lacey & Cole 1993, 1994; Wechsler et al. 2002; van den Bosch 2002; Zhao et al. 2003b,a; Tasitsiomi et al. 2004; Cohn & White 2005; Neistein et al. 2006; Li et al. 2008; Zhao et al. 2009; McBride et al. 2009).”
A Cosmological Framework for the Co-Evolution of Quasars, Supermassive Black Holes, and Elliptical Galaxies. II. Formation of Red Ellipticals (2007, background): “The average halomass accretion history in a CDM universe is well defined (here we adopt the average progenitor mass as a function of time from Neistein et al. 2006).”
CLASH-VLT: The mass, velocity-anisotropy, and pseudo-phase-space density profiles of the z = 0.44 galaxy cluster MACS J1206.2-0847 (2013, background): “This can happen because of downsizing (e.g. Neistein et al. 2006), or because of the eff cts of tidal stripping (e.g. Balogh et al. 2002).”
Mass accretion rates and histories of dark matter haloes (2009, methodology): “This z-dependence is motivated by our 2- parameter form for M(z) and is more accurate than the simple power law used in Genel et al. (2008), Neistein et al. (2006), and Neistein & Dekel (2008); our z ∼ 0 value, on the other hand, is consistent with theirs to within 20%.”
Galactic star formation and accretion histories from matching galaxies to dark matter haloes (2012, background): “This demonstrates that ‘downsizing’ is not antihierarchical, but a consequence of the bottom-up ΛCDM scenario (Neistein et al. 2006; Fontanot et al. 2009).”
THE IMPACT OF COLD GAS ACCRETION ABOVE A MASS FLOOR ON GALAXY SCALING RELATIONS (2009, background): “As it was first realized in Neistein et al. (2006), the archeological downsizing effect is a direct consequence of a mass floor Mmin.”
Star Formation in AEGIS Field Galaxies since z = 1.1: Staged Galaxy Formation and a Model of Mass-dependent Gas Exhaustion (2007, background): “CDM structure formation provides a framework for a systematic relation between the dominant SF epoch and present-day galaxy mass (Neistein et al. 2006).”
The Dependence of Star Formation on Galaxy Stellar Mass (2007, result): “…rate of decline of SFR and SSFR for galaxies of widely differing masses is in contrast to the predictions of theoretical models in which cooling and hence star formation is quenched by heating due to radio-loud AGN (e.g., Croton et al. 2006; Bower et al. 2006; but see also Neistein et al. 2006).”
The rates and modes of gas accretion on to galaxies and their gaseous haloes (2010, methodology): “They also agree well with a fit to an analytic prediction for dark matter accretion rates based on the extended Press–Schechter formalism given by Dekel et al. (2009b) and derived by Neistein et al. (2006).”
Building merger trees from cosmological N-body simulations. Towards improving galaxy formation model (2009, methodology): “19 to Fig.5 of Neistein et al. (2006), who plot the same quantities for MonteCarlo merging trees based on the EPS formalism, as we can use their calculations to infer the impact of mass resolution onour results.”