English

The relation between galaxy morphology and colour in the EAGLE simulation

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2017-10-11 v1

Abstract

We investigate the relation between kinematic morphology, intrinsic colour and stellar mass of galaxies in the EAGLE cosmological hydrodynamical simulation. We calculate the intrinsic u-r colours and measure the fraction of kinetic energy invested in ordered corotation of 3562 galaxies at z=0 with stellar masses larger than 1010M10^{10}M_{\odot}. We perform a visual inspection of gri-composite images and find that our kinematic morphology correlates strongly with visual morphology. EAGLE produces a galaxy population for which morphology is tightly correlated with the location in the colour- mass diagram, with the red sequence mostly populated by elliptical galaxies and the blue cloud by disc galaxies. Satellite galaxies are more likely to be on the red sequence than centrals, and for satellites the red sequence is morphologically more diverse. These results show that the connection between mass, intrinsic colour and morphology arises from galaxy formation models that reproduce the observed galaxy mass function and sizes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.06283,
  title  = {The relation between galaxy morphology and colour in the EAGLE simulation},
  author = {Camila A. Correa and Joop Schaye and Bart Clauwens and Richard G. Bower and Robert A. Crain and Matthieu Schaller and Tom Theuns and Adrien C. R. Thob},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.06283},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Letter submitted to MNRAS, 5 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:23:03.287Z