Quenching is a key topic in exploring the formation and evolution of galaxies. In this work, we study the quenching rate, i.e., the variation in the fraction of quenched galaxies per unit time, of the Illustris-1 simulation. By building the quenched fraction function $f(m,ρ, t)$ of each snapshot in the simulation, we derive an accurate form of quenching rate as $\Re_q=df(m,ρ,t)/dt$. According to the analytic expression of the quenching rate $\Re_q$, we split it into four components: mass quenching, environmental quenching, intrinsic mass quenching and intrinsic environmental quenching. The precise value and evolutions can be given via the formula of $\Re_q$. With this method, we analyze the Illustris-1 simulation. We find that quenched galaxies concentrate around $M_*\simeq10^{11}h^{-1}M_\odot$ and $δ+1\simeq10^{3.5}$ at earlier times, and that the quenching galaxy population slowly shifts to lower stellar mass and lower overdensity regions with time. We also find that mass quenching dominates the quenching process in this simulation, in agreement with some previous analytical models. Intrinsic quenching is the second most important component. Environmental quenching is very weak, because it is possible that the pre- or postprocessing of environments disguises environmental quenching as intrinsic quenching. We find that our method roughly predict the actual quenching rate. It could well predict the actual amount of galaxies quenched by intrinsic quenching. However, it overestimates the amount of mass quenching galaxies and underestimates the amount of environmental quenching. We suggest that the reason is the nonlinearity of the environmental overdensity change and mass growth of the galaxy.
A rare population of massive disk galaxies have been found to invade the red sequence dominated by early-type galaxies. These red/quenched massive disk galaxies have recently gained great interest into their formation and origins. The usually proposed quenching mechanisms, such as bar quenching and environment quenching, seem not suitable for those bulge-less quenched disks in low-density environment. In this paper, we use the IllustrisTNG-300 simulation to investigate the formation of massive quenched central disk galaxies. It is found that these galaxies contain less gas and harbor giant sup…
We investigate the role of galaxy mergers on supermassive black hole (SMBH) accretion and star formation quenching in three state-of-the-art cosmological simulations with contrasting physics models: EAGLE, Illustris and IllustrisTNG. We find that recently coalesced 'post-mergers' in all three simulations have elevated SMBH accretion rates by factors of ~2-5. However, rapid (within 500 Myr of coalescence) quenching of star formation is rare, with incidence rates of 0.4% in Illustris, 4.5% in EAGLE and 10% in IllustrisTNG. The rarity of quenching in post-mergers results from substantial gas rese…
The timescales for galaxy quenching offer clues to its underlying physical drivers. We investigate central galaxy quenching timescales in the IllustrisTNG 100-1 simulation, their evolution over time, and the pre-quenching properties of galaxies that predict their quenching timescales. Defining quenching duration $τ_q$ as the time between crossing sSFR thresholds, we find that $\sim$40% of galaxies quench rapidly with $τ_q<$1 Gyr, but a substantial tail of galaxies can take up to 10 Gyr to quench. Furthermore, 29% of galaxies that left the star forming main sequence (SFMS) more than 2 Gyr ago n…
Galaxy mergers are traditionally one of the favoured mechanisms for quenching star formation. To test this paradigm in the context of modern cosmological simulations, we use the IllustrisTNG simulation to investigate the impact of individual merger events on quenching (i.e. star formation rate at least 3sig below the star-forming main sequence) within 500Myr after the coalescence phase.The rate of quenching amongst recently merged galaxies is compared with a control sample that is matched in redshift, stellar mass, star formation rate (SFR), black hole mass and environment.We find quenching to…
We investigate the influence of active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback on the galaxy cold gas content and its connection to galaxy quenching in three hydrodynamical simulations of Illustris, IllustrisTNG and SIMBA. By comparing to the observed atomic and molecular neutral hydrogen measurements for central galaxies, we find that Illustris over-predicts the cold gas masses in star-forming galaxies and significantly under-predicts them for quenched galaxies. IllustrisTNG performs better in this comparison than Illustris, but quenched galaxies retain too much cold gas compared with observations. S…
Beyond the Merger-Quasar-Quench Paradigm I: Mergers are neither necessary nor sufficient to quench central galaxies in IllustrisTNG
Stocker AstroScience Center, Dept. of Physics, Florida International University（佛罗里达国际大学斯托克天体科学中心物理系）；Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院卡希尔天文与天体物理中心）
Using the IllustrisTNG cosmological galaxy formation simulations, we analyze the physical properties of young quiescent galaxies at z=2 with stellar masses above 10^10.5 solar masses. This key population provides an unaltered probe into the evolution of galaxies from star-forming to quiescent and has been recently targeted by several observational studies. Young quiescent galaxies in the simulations do not appear unusually compact, in tension with observations, but they show unique age gradients that are qualitatively consistent with the observed color gradients. In particular, more than half …
In this paper we investigate how massive central galaxies cease their star formation by comparing theoretical predictions from cosmological simulations: EAGLE, Illustris and IllustrisTNG with observations of the local Universe from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Our machine learning (ML) classification reveals supermassive black hole mass ($M_{\rm BH}$) as the most predictive parameter in determining whether a galaxy is star forming or quenched at redshift $z=0$ in all three simulations. This predicted consequence of active galactic nucleus (AGN) quenching is reflected in the observation…
We quantify the impact that a variety of galactic and environmental properties have on the quenching of star formation. We collate a sample of $\sim$ 400,000 central and $\sim$ 100,000 satellite galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (SDSS DR7). Specifically, we consider central velocity dispersion ($σ_{c}$), stellar, halo, bulge and disk mass, local density, bulge-to-total ratio, group-centric distance and galaxy-halo mass ratio. We develop and apply a new statistical technique to quantify the impact on the quenched fraction ($f_{\rm Quench}$) of varying one parameter, whil…
We compare galaxy morphology predicted by the Illustris hydrodynamical simulation and a semi-analytic model (SAM) grafted in the halo merger trees from the Illustris-Dark matter simulation. Morphology is classified according to the luminous profile and the kinematic bulge-to-total ratio for Illustris galaxy, and the bulge-to-total stellar mass ratio for SAM galaxy. For late-type galaxies in the Illustris catalogue, most of their counterparts in the SAM model have the same type, and the consistency between two models is higher for lower mass galaxies. For early-type (ET) galaxies in Illustris, …
Using the TNG100 (100 Mpc)^3 simulation of the IllustrisTNG project, we demonstrate a strong connection between the onset of star formation quenching and the stellar size of galaxies. We do so by tracking the evolutionary history of extended and normal-size galaxies selected at z=2 with log(M_star) = 10.2 - 11 and stellar-half-mass-radii above and within 1-sigma of the stellar size--stellar mass relation, respectively. We match the stellar mass and star formation rate distributions of the two populations. By z=1, only 36% of the extended massive galaxies have quenched, in contrast to a quenche…
Abundance matching studies have shown that the average relationship between galaxy radius and dark matter halo virial radius remains nearly constant over many orders of magnitude in halo mass, and over cosmic time since about $z=3$. In this work, we investigate the predicted relationship between galaxy radius $r_{e}$ and halo virial radius $R_{\rm h}$ in the numerical hydrodynamical simulations Illustris and IllustrisTNG from $z\sim 0$--3, and compare with the results from the abundance matching studies. We find that Illustris predicts much higher $r_e/R_{\rm h}$ values than the constraints ob…
We examine the connection between the properties of the circumgalactic medium (CGM) and the quenching and morphological evolution of central galaxies in the EAGLE and IllustrisTNG simulations. The simulations yield very different median CGM mass fractions, $f_{\rm CGM}$, as a function of halo mass, $M_{200}$, with low-mass haloes being significantly more gas-rich in IllustrisTNG than in EAGLE. Nonetheless, in both cases scatter in $f_{\rm CGM}$ at fixed $M_{200}$ is strongly correlated with the specific star formation rate and the kinematic morphology of central galaxies. The correlations are …
We study the spiral arm morphology of a sample of the local spiral galaxies in the Illustris simulation and explore the supermassive black hole - galaxy connection beyond the bulge (e.g., spiral arm pitch angle, total stellar mass, dark matter mass, and total halo mass), finding good agreement with other theoretical studies and observational constraints. It is important to study the properties of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies through both observations and simulations and compare their results in order to understand their physics and formative histories.We find that Illustris…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) which reside at the centres of galaxies can inject vast amounts of energy into the surrounding gas and are thought to be a viable mechanism to quench star-formation in massive galaxies. Here we study the $10^{9\textrm{--}12.5}\,\mathrm{M_\odot}$ stellar mass central galaxy population of the IllustrisTNG simulation, specifically the TNG100 and TNG300 volumes at \zeq{0}, and show how the three components -- SMBH, galaxy, and circumgalactic medium (CGM) -- are interconnected in their evolution. We find that gas entropy is a sensitive diagnostic of feedback injecti…
We study how optical galaxy morphology depends on mass and star formation rate (SFR) in the Illustris Simulation. To do so, we measure automated galaxy structures in 10808 simulated galaxies at z=0 with stellar masses 10^9.7 < M_*/M_sun < 10^12.3. We add observational realism to idealized synthetic images and measure non-parametric statistics in rest-frame optical and near-IR images from four directions. We find that Illustris creates a morphologically diverse galaxy population, occupying the observed bulge strength locus and reproducing median morphology trends versus stellar mass, SFR, and c…
We analyze scaling relations and evolution histories of galaxy sizes in TNG100, part of the IllustrisTNG simulation suite. Observational qualitative trends of size with stellar mass, star-formation rate and redshift are reproduced, and a quantitative comparison of projected r-band sizes at 0~<z<~2 shows agreement to much better than 0.25dex. We follow populations of z=0 galaxies with a range of masses backwards in time along their main progenitor branches, distinguishing between main-sequence and quenched galaxies. Our main findings are as follows. (i) At M_{*,z=0}>~10^{9.5}Msun, the evolution…
We present and analyze a series of synthetic galaxy survey fields based on the IllustrisTNG Simulation suite. With the Illustris public data release and JupyterLab service, we generated a set of twelve lightcone catalogs covering areas from 5 to 365 square arcminutes, similar to several JWST Cycle 1 programs, including JADES, CEERS, PRIMER, and NGDEEP. From these catalogs, we queried the public API to generate simple mock images in a series of broadband filters used by JWST-NIRCam and the Hubble Space Telescope cameras. This procedure generates wide-area simulated mosaic images that can suppor…
We present the first study of evolution of galaxy groups in the Illustris simulation. We focus on dynamically relaxed and unrelaxed galaxy groups representing dynamically evolved and evolving galaxy systems, respectively. The evolutionary state of a group is probed from its luminosity gap and separation between the brightest group galaxy and the center of mass of the group members. We find that the Illustris simulation, over-produces large luminosity gap galaxy systems, known as fossil systems, in comparison to observations and the probed semi-analytical predictions. However, this simulation i…
We present our methods for generating a catalog of 7,000 synthetic images and 40,000 integrated spectra of redshift z = 0 galaxies from the Illustris Simulation. The mock data products are produced by using stellar population synthesis models to assign spectral energy distributions (SED) to each star particle in the galaxies. The resulting synthetic images and integrated SEDs therefore properly reflect the spatial distribution, stellar metallicity distribution, and star formation history of the galaxies. From the synthetic data products it is possible to produce monochromatic or color-composit…
Supermassive black hole feedback is thought to be responsible for the lack of star formation, or quiescence, in a significant fraction of galaxies. We explore how observable correlations between the specific star formation rate (sSFR), stellar mass (M$_{\rm{star}}$), and black hole mass (M$_{\rm{BH}}$) are sensitive to the physics of black hole feedback in a galaxy formation model. We use the IllustrisTNG simulation suite, specifically the TNG100 simulation and ten model variations that alter the parameters of the black hole model. Focusing on central galaxies at $z = 0$ with M$_{\rm{star}} > …
Galaxy assembly bias, the correlation between galaxy properties and halo properties at fixed halo mass, could be an important ingredient in halo-based modelling of galaxy clustering. We investigate the central galaxy assembly bias by studying the relation between various galaxy and halo properties in the Illustris hydrodynamic galaxy formation simulation. Galaxy stellar mass $\Mstar$ is found to have a tighter correlation with peak maximum halo circular velocity $\Vp$ than with halo mass $\Mh$. Once the correlation with $\Vp$ is accounted for, $\Mstar$ has nearly no dependence on any other hal…
Recent stellar population analysis of early-type galaxy spectra has demonstrated that the low-mass galaxies in cluster centers have high [$α/\rm Fe$] and old ages characteristic of massive galaxies and unlike the low-mass galaxy population in the outskirts of clusters and fields. This phenomenon has been termed "coordinated assembly" to highlight the fact that the building blocks of massive cluster central galaxies are drawn from a special subset of the overall low-mass galaxy population. Here we explore this idea in the IllustrisTNG simulations, particularly the TNG300 run, in order to unders…
Massive stars are thought to be progenitors of Long Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs), most likely with a bias favouring low metallicity progenitors. Because galaxies do not have a constant metallicity throughout, the combination of line-of-sight absorption metallicity inferred from GRB afterglow spectroscopy and of host galaxy global metallicity derived from emission lines diagnostics represents a powerful way to probe both the bias function for GRB progenitors, and the chemical inhomogeneities across star forming regions. In this study, we predict the relationship between Zabs and Zem using three diff…
We present the first results from applying the Santa Cruz semi-analytic model (SAM) for galaxy formation on merger trees extracted from a dark matter only version of the IllustrisTNG (TNG) simulations. We carry out a statistical comparison between the predictions of the Santa Cruz SAM and TNG for a subset of central galaxy properties at z = 0, with a focus on stellar mass, cold and hot gas mass, star formation rate (SFR), and black hole (BH) mass. We find fairly good agreement between the mean predictions of the two methods for stellar mass functions and the stellar mass vs. halo mass (SMHM) r…
In spatially resolved galaxy observations, star formation rate radial profiles are found to correlate with total specific star formation rates. A central depletion in star formation is thought to correlate with the globally depressed star formation rates of, for example, galaxies within the Green Valley. We present, for the first time, radial specific star formation rate profiles for a statistical sample of simulated galaxies from the Illustris and EAGLE large cosmological simulations. For galaxies on the star-forming sequence, simulated specific star formation rate profiles are in loose agree…
The interpretive power of the newest generation of large-volume hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation rests upon their ability to reproduce the observed properties of galaxies. In this second paper in a series, we employ bulge+disc decompositions of realistic dust-free galaxy images from the Illustris simulation in a consistent comparison with galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Examining the size-luminosity relations of each sample, we find that galaxies in Illustris are roughly twice as large and $0.7$ magnitudes brighter on average than galaxies in the SDSS. The tren…
We explore the isothermal total density profiles of early-type galaxies (ETGs) in the IllustrisTNG simulation. For the selected 559 ETGs at $z = 0$ with stellar mass $10^{10.7}\mathrm{M}_{\odot} \leqslant M_{\ast} \leqslant 10^{11.9}\mathrm{M}_{\odot}$, the total power-law slope has a mean of $\langleγ^{\prime}\rangle = 2.011 \pm 0.007$ and a scatter of $σ_{γ^{\prime}} = 0.171$ over the radial range 0.4 to 4 times the stellar half mass radius. Several correlations between $γ^{\prime}$ and galactic properties including stellar mass, effective radius, stellar surface density, central velocity di…
Recent studies have found higher galaxy metallicities in richer environments. It is not yet clear, however, whether metallicity-environment dependencies are merely an indirect consequence of environmentally dependent formation histories, or of environment related processes directly affecting metallicity. Here, we present a first detailed study of metallicity-environment correlations in a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation, in particular the Illustris simulation. Illustris galaxies display similar relations to those observed. Utilizing our knowledge of simulated formation histories, and lev…
Using the IllustrisTNG simulation, we study the interaction of large-scale shocks with the circumgalactic medium (CGM) and interstellar medium (ISM) of star-forming (SF) satellite galaxies in galaxy clusters. These shocks are usually produced by mergers and massive accretion. Our visual inspection shows that approximately half of SF satellites have encountered shocks in their host clusters at $z\leq0.11$. After a satellite crosses a shock front and enters the postshock region, the ram pressure on it is boosted significantly. Both the CGM and ISM can be severely impacted, either by striping or …
There is a consensus in the literature that starburst galaxies are triggered by inter- action events. However, it remains an open question as to what extent both merging and non-merging interactions have in triggering starbursts? In this study, we make use of the Illustris simulation to test how different triggering mechanisms can effect starburst events. We examine star formation rate, colour and environment of starburst galaxies to determine if this could be why we witness a bimodality in post-starburst populations within observational studies. Further, we briefly test the extent of quenchin…
We study the effect of baryonic processes on the shapes of dark matter (DM) haloes from Illustris, a suite of hydrodynamical (Illustris) and DM-only (Illustris-Dark) cosmological simulations performed with the moving-mesh code {\sc arepo}. DM halo shapes are determined using an iterative method based on the inertia tensor for a wide range of $z=0$ masses ($M_{200} = 1 \times 10^{11} - 3 \times 10^{14} M_\odot$). Convergence tests shows that the local DM shape profiles are converged only for $r > 9ε$, $ε$ being the Plummer-equivalent softening length, larger than expected. Haloes from non-radia…
How mergers shape galaxy morphology in the IllustrisTNG simulation
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院国家天文台）；Institute for Frontiers in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学前沿天文与天体物理研究所）；School of Physics and Microelectronics, Zhengzhou University（郑州大学物理与电气工程学院）；School of Astronomy and Space Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学天文与空间科学学院）
We present image-based evolution of galaxy mergers from the Illustris cosmological simulation at 12 time-steps over 0.5 < z < 5. To do so, we created approximately one million synthetic deep Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope images and measured common morphological indicators. Using the merger tree, we assess methods to observationally select mergers with stellar mass ratios as low as 10:1 completing within +/- 250 Myr of the mock observation. We confirm that common one- or two-dimensional statistics select mergers so defined with low purity and completeness, leading to hig…
We compare the star forming main sequence (SFMS) -- both integrated and resolved on 1kpc scales -- between the high-resolution TNG50 simulation of IllustrisTNG and observations from the 3D-HST slitless spectroscopic survey at z~1. Contrasting integrated star formation rates (SFRs), we find that the slope and normalization of the star-forming main sequence in TNG50 are quantitatively consistent with values derived by fitting observations from 3D-HST with the Prospector Bayesian inference framework. The previous offsets of 0.2-1dex between observed and simulated main sequence normalizations are …
CAMELS Environments: The Impact of Local Neighbours on Galaxy Evolution across the SIMBA, IllustrisTNG, ASTRID, and Swift-EAGLE Simulations
University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）；Korea Institute for Advanced Study（韩国高等研究院）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Flatiron Institute（平顿研究所）
Does the environment of a galaxy directly influence the quenching history of a galaxy? Here we investigate the detailed morphological structures and star formation histories of a sample of SDSS group galaxies with both classifications from Galaxy Zoo 2 and NUV detections in GALEX. We use the optical and NUV colours to infer the quenching time and rate describing a simple exponentially declining SFH for each galaxy, along with a control sample of field galaxies. We find that the time since quenching and the rate of quenching do not correlate with the relative velocity of a satellite but are cor…
A fundamental feature of galaxies is their structure, yet we are just now understanding the evolution of structural properties in quantitative ways. As such, we explore the quantitative non-parametric structural evolution of 16,778 galaxies up to $z\sim3$ in all five CANDELS fields, the largest collection of high resolution images of distant galaxies to date. Our goal is to investigate how the structure, as opposed to size, surface brightness, or mass, changes with time. In particular, we investigate how the concentration and asymmetry of light evolve in the rest-frame optical. To interpret ou…
Numerical effects on the stripping of dark matter and stars in IllustrisTNG galaxy groups and clusters
Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University（达勒姆大学计算宇宙学研究所）；Department of Physics, Durham University（达勒姆大学物理系）；Centre for Astrophysics and Cosmology, Science Institute, University of Iceland（冰岛大学科学研究所天体物理学与宇宙学中心）；Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie（马克斯·普朗克天文学研究所）；Universität Heidelberg, Zentrum für Astronomie, Institut für theoretische Astrophysik（海德堡大学天文学中心理论天体物理研究所）；Max Planck Institut für Astrophysik（马克斯·普朗克天体物理研究所）
We use the improved IllustrisTNG300 magneto-hydrodynamical cosmological simulation to revisit the effect that secondary halo bias has on the clustering of the central galaxy population. With a side length of 205 $h^{-1}$Mpc and significant improvements on the sub-grid model with respect to the previous Illustris boxes, IllustrisTNG300 allows us to explore the dependencies of galaxy clustering over a large cosmological volume and wide halo-mass range. We show, at high statistical significance, that the halo assembly bias signal (i.e., the secondary dependence of halo bias on halo formation reds…
We identify the intrinsic dependence of star formation quenching on a variety of galactic and environmental parameters, utilizing a machine learning approach with Random Forest classification. We have previously demonstrated the power of this technique to isolate causality, not mere correlation, in complex astronomical data. First, we analyze three cosmological hydrodynamical simulations (Eagle, Illustris, and IllustrisTNG), selecting snapshots spanning the bulk of cosmic history from comic noon ($z \sim 2$) to the present epoch, with stellar masses in the range $9 < \log(M_*/M_{\odot}) < 12$.…
We study the connection between active galactic nuclei (AGN) and their host galaxies through cosmic time in the large-scale cosmological IllustrisTNG simulations. We first compare BH properties, i.e. the hard X-ray BH luminosity function, AGN galaxy occupation fraction, and distribution of Eddington ratios, to available observational constraints. The simulations produce a population of BHs in good agreement with observations, but we note an excess of faint AGN in hard X-ray (L_x ~ 10^{43-44} erg/s), and a lower number of bright AGN (L_x>10^{44} erg/s), a conclusion that varies quantitatively b…
We perform a comparison, object-by-object and statistically, between the Munich semi-analytical model, L-Galaxies, and the IllustrisTNG hydrodynamical simulations. By running L-Galaxies on the IllustrisTNG dark matter-only merger trees, we identify the same galaxies in the two models. This allows us to compare the stellar mass, star formation rate and gas content of galaxies, as well as the baryonic content of subhaloes and haloes in the two models. We find that both the stellar mass functions and the stellar masses of individual galaxies agree to better than $\sim0.2\,$dex. On the other hand,…
We present the first comparison of observed stellar continuum spectra of high-redshift galaxies and mock galaxy spectra generated from hydrodynamical simulations. The mock spectra are produced from the IllustrisTNG TNG100 simulation combined with stellar population models and take into account dust attenuation and realistic observational effects (aperture effects and noise). We compare the simulated $D_n4000$ and EW(H$δ$) of galaxies with $10.5 \leq \log(M_\ast/M_\odot) \leq 11.5$ at $0.6 \leq z \leq 1.0$ to the observed distributions from the LEGA-C survey. TNG100 globally reproduces the obse…
