Understanding the formation history of brightest cluster galaxies is an important topic in galaxy formation. Utilizing the Planck Sunyaev-Zel'dovich cluster catalog, and applying the Ansatz that the most massive halos at one redshift remain among the most massive ones at a slightly later cosmic epoch, we have constructed cluster samples at redshift z~0.4 and z~0.2 that can be statistically regarded as progenitor-descendant pairs. This allows us to study the stellar mass assembly history of BCGs in these massive clusters at late times, finding the degree of growth between the two epochs is likely at only few percent level, which is far lower compared to the prediction from a state-of-the-art semi-analytic galaxy formation model.
@article{arxiv.1409.4820,
title = {Stellar Mass Assembly of Brightest Cluster Galaxies at Late Times},
author = {Takahiro Inagaki and Yen-Ting Lin and Hung-Jin Huang and Bau-Ching Hsieh and Naoshi Sugiyama},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.4820},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
11 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables; resubmitted to MNRAS after addressing the referee report