Galaxy formation and evolution

Abstract:

Arguably the main challenge of galactic magnetism studies is to explain how the interstellar medium of galaxies reaches energetic equipartition despite the extremely weak cosmic primordial magnetic fields that are originally predicted to thread the inter-galactic medium. Previous numerical studies of isolated galaxies suggest that a fast dynamo amplification might suffice to bridge the gap spanning many orders of magnitude in strength between the weak early Universe magnetic fields and the ones observed in high redshift galaxies. To better understand their evolution in the cosmological context of hierarchical galaxy growth, we probe the amplification process undergone by the cosmic magnetic field within a spiral galaxy to unprecedented accuracy by means of a suite of constrained transport magnetohydrodynamical adaptive mesh refinement cosmological zoom simulations with different stellar feedback prescriptions. A galactic turbulent dynamo is found to be naturally excited in this cosmological environment, being responsible for most of the amplification of the magnetic energy. Indeed, we find that the magnetic energy spectra of simulated galaxies display telltale inverse cascades. Overall, the amplification process can be divided in three main phases, which are related to different physical mechanisms driving galaxy evolution: an initial collapse phase, an accretion-driven phase, and a feedback-driven phase. While different feedback models affect the magnetic field amplification differently, all tested models prove to be subdominant at early epochs, before the feedback-driven phase is reached. Thus the three-phase evolution paradigm is found to be quite robust vis-a-vis feedback prescriptions.

Abstract:

The anisotropic distribution of satellites around the central galaxy of their host halo is well-documented. However the relative impact of baryons and dark matter in shaping this distribution is still debated. Using the simulation Horizon-AGN, the angular distribution of satellite galaxies with respect to their central counterpart and halo is quantified. Below one Rvir, satellites cluster more strongly in the plane of the central, rather than merely tracing the shape of their host halo. This is due to the increased isotropy of inner haloes acquired through their inside-out assembly in vorticity-rich flows along the cosmic web. While the effect of centrals decreases with distance, halos' triaxiality increases, impacting more and more the satellite's distribution. Effects become comparable just outside one virial radius. Above this scale, the filamentary infall also impacts the satellites distribution, dominating above two virial radii. The central's morphology plays a governing role: the alignment w.r.t. the central plane is four times stronger in haloes hosting stellar discs than in spheroids. But the impact of the galactic plane decreases for lower satellite-to-central mass ratios, suggesting this might not hold for dwarf satellites of the Local group. The orientation of the Milky-Way's satellites traces their cosmic filament, their level of coplanarity is consistent with systems of similar mass and cosmic location in Horizon-AGN. However, the strong impact of galactic planes in massive groups and clusters bounds the likelihood of finding a relaxed region where satellites can be used to infer halo shape. The minor-to-major axis ratios for haloes with log(M0/Msun)>13.5 is underestimated by 10%. This error soars quickly to 30-40% for individual halo measurements.

Abstract:

We present a comparison of nine galaxy formation models, eight semi-analytical and one halo occupation distribution model, run on the same underlying cold dark matter simulation (cosmological box of co-moving width 125$h^{-1}$ Mpc, with a dark-matter particle mass of $1.24\times 10^9 h^{-1}$ Msun) and the same merger trees. While their free parameters have been calibrated to the same observational data sets using two approaches, they nevertheless retain some 'memory' of any previous calibration that served as the starting point (especially for the manually-tuned models). For the first calibration, models reproduce the observed z = 0 galaxy stellar mass function (SMF) within 3-{\sigma}. The second calibration extended the observational data to include the z = 2 SMF alongside the z~0 star formation rate function, cold gas mass and the black hole-bulge mass relation. Encapsulating the observed evolution of the SMF from z = 2 to z = 0 is found to be very hard within the context of the physics currently included in the models. We finally use our calibrated models to study the evolution of the stellar-to-halo mass (SHM) ratio. For all models we find that the peak value of the SHM relation decreases with redshift. However, the trends seen for the evolution of the peak position as well as the mean scatter in the SHM relation are rather weak and strongly model dependent. Both the calibration data sets and model results are publicly available.

Abstract:

The high abundance of disk galaxies without a large central bulge challenges predictions of current hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation. We aim to shed light on the formation of these objects by studying the redshift and mass dependence of their 3D shape distribution in the COSMOS galaxy survey. This distribution is inferred from the observed distribution of 2D shapes, using a reconstruction method which we test using hydrodynamic simulations. We find a moderate bias for the inferred average disk circularity and relative thickness with respect to the disk radius, but a large bias on the dispersion of these quantities. Applying the 3D shape reconstruction method on COSMOS data, we find no significant dependence of the inferred 3D shape distribution on redshift. The relative disk thickness shows a significant mass dependence which can be accounted for by the scaling of disk radius with galaxy mass. We conclude that the shapes of disk dominated galaxies are overall not subject to disruptive merging or feedback events below redshift $z=1.0$. This favours a scenario where these disks form early and subsequently undergo a tranquil evolution in isolation. In addition, our study shows that the observed 2D shapes of disk dominated galaxies can be well fitted using an ellipsoidal model for the galaxy 3D morphology combined with a Gaussian model for the 3D axes ratio distribution, confirming findings from similar work reported in the literature. Such an approach allows to build realistic mock catalogs with intrinsic galaxy shapes that will be essential for the study of intrinsic galaxy alignment as a contaminant of weak lensing surveys.

Abstract:

We describe our program for the dynamical modeling of early-type galaxies observed with the panoramic integral-field spectrograph SAURON. We are using Schwarzschild's numerical orbit superposition method to reproduce in detail all kinematical and photometric observables, and recover the intrinsic orbital structure of the galaxies. Since catastrophes are the most prominent features in the orbital observables, two-dimensional kinematical coverage is essential to constrain the dynamical models.