Mufasa:The strength and evolution of galaxy conformity in various tracers
Abstract
We investigate galaxy conformity using the Mufasa cosmological hydrodynamical simulation. We show a bimodal distribution in galaxy colour with radius, albeit with too many low-mass quenched satellite galaxies compared to observations. Mufasa produces conformity in observed properties such as colour, sSFR, and HI content; i.e neighbouring galaxies have similar properties. We see analogous trends in other properties such as in environment, stellar age, H content, and metallicity. We introduce quantifying conformity using , measuring the relative difference in upper and lower quartile properties of the neighbours. We show that low-mass and non-quenched haloes have weak conformity () extending to large projected radii in all properties, while high-mass and quenched haloes have strong conformity () that diminishes rapidly with and disappears at Mpc. is strongest for environment in low-mass haloes, and sSFR (or colour) in high-mass haloes, and is dominated by one-halo conformity with the exception of HI in small haloes. Metallicity shows a curious anti-conformity in massive haloes. Tracking the evolution of conformity for galaxies back in time shows that conformity broadly emerges as a late-time () phenomenon. However, for fixed halo mass bins, conformity is fairly constant with redshift out to . These trends are consistent with the idea that strong conformity only emerges once haloes grow above Mufasa's quenching mass scale of . A quantitative measure of conformity in various properties, along with its evolution, thus represents a new and stringent test of the impact of quenching on environment within current galaxy formation models.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1707.01950,
title = {Mufasa:The strength and evolution of galaxy conformity in various tracers},
author = {Mika Rafieferantsoa and Romeel Davé},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.01950},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
21 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS (comments are still welcome)