English

Extensions to models of the galaxy-halo connection

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2020-12-16 v1

Abstract

We explore two widely used empirical models for the galaxy-halo connection, subhalo abundance matching (SHAM) and the halo occupation distribution (HOD) and compare their predictions with the hydrodynamical simulation IllustrisTNG (TNG) for a range of statistics that quantify the galaxy distribution at ngal1.3×103[Mpc/h]3n_{\rm gal}\approx1.3\times10^{-3}\,[{\rm Mpc}/h]^{-3}. We observe that in their most straightforward implementations, both models fail to reproduce the two-point clustering measured in TNG. We find that SHAM models constructed using the relaxation velocity, VrelaxV_{\rm relax}, and the peak velocity, VpeakV_{\rm peak}, perform best, and match the clustering reasonably well, although neither model captures adequately the one-halo clustering. Splitting the total sample into sub-populations, we discover that SHAM overpredicts the clustering of high-mass, blue, star-forming, and late-forming galaxies and uderpredicts that of low-mass, red, quiescent, and early-forming galaxies. We also study various baryonic effects, finding that subhalos in the dark-mater-only simulation have consistently higher values of their SHAM-proxy properties than their full-physics counterparts. We then consider a two-dimensional implementation of the HOD model augmented with a secondary parameter (environment, velocity anisotropy, σ2Rhalfmass\sigma^2R_{\rm halfmass}, and total potential) and tuned so as to match the two-point clustering of the IllustrisTNG galaxies on large scales. We analyze these galaxy populations adopting alternative statistical tools such as galaxy-galaxy lensing, void-galaxy cross-correlations and cumulants of the smoothed density field, finding that the hydrodynamical galaxy distribution disfavors σ2Rhalfmass\sigma^2 R_{\rm halfmass} and the total potential as secondary parameters, while the environment and velocity anisotropy samples are consistent with full-physics across all statistical probes examined.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.04913,
  title  = {Extensions to models of the galaxy-halo connection},
  author = {Boryana Hadzhiyska and Sownak Bose and Daniel Eisenstein and Lars Hernquist},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.04913},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

17 pages, 11 figures