We estimate the 3D density profile of the Galactic dark matter (DM) halo within $r \lesssim 30$ kpc from the Galactic centre by using the astrometric data for halo RR Lyrae stars from Gaia DR2. We model both the stellar halo distribution function and the Galactic potential, fully taking into account the survey selection function, the observational errors, and the missing line-of-sight velocity data for RR Lyrae stars. With a Bayesian MCMC method, we infer the model parameters, including the density flattening of the DM halo $q$, which is assumed to be constant as a function of radius. We find that 99\% of the posterior distribution of $q$ is located at $q>0.963$, which strongly disfavours a flattened DM halo. We cannot draw any conclusions as to whether the Galactic DM halo at $r \lesssim 30$ kpc is prolate, because we restrict ourselves to axisymmetric oblate halo models with $q\leq1$. Our result is inconsistent with predictions from cosmological hydrodynamical simulations that advocate more oblate ($\langle{q}\rangle \sim0.8 \pm 0.15$) DM halos within $\sim 15\%$ of the virial radius for Milky-Way-sized galaxies. An alternative possibility, based on our validation tests with a cosmological simulation, is that the true value $q$ of the Galactic halo could be consistent with cosmological simulations but that disequilibrium in the Milky Way potential is inflating our measurement of $q$ by 0.1-0.2. As a by-product of our analysis, our model constrains the DM density in the Solar neighbourhood to be $ρ_{\mathrm{DM},\odot} = (9.01^{+0.18}_{-0.20})\times10^{-3}M_\odot \mathrm{pc}^{-3} = 0.342^{+0.007}_{-0.007}$ $\;\mathrm{GeV} \mathrm{cm}^{-3}$.
I can see your halo: Constraining the Milky Way halo DM with FRB population studies
International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, Curtin University(国际射电天文中心,科廷大学);Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz(天体物理学系,加州大学圣克鲁兹分校);Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Royal Observatory(天文研究所,爱丁堡大学,皇家天文台)
Most galaxies are hosted by massive, invisible dark matter haloes, yet little is known about the scatter in the stellar mass--halo mass relation for galaxies with host halo masses $M_{h}\le 10^{11}M_{\odot}$. Using mock catalogues based on dark matter simulations, we find that two observable signatures are sensitive to scatter in the stellar mass--halo mass relation even at these mass scales; i.e., conditional stellar mass functions and velocity distribution functions for neighbouring galaxies. We compute these observables for 179,373 galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) with stella…
We study the cross correlation of damped Ly$α$ systems (DLAs) and their background quasars, using the most updated DLA catalog and the Planck 2018 CMB lensing convergence field. Our measurement suggests that the DLA bias $b_{\rm DLA}$ is smaller than $3.1$, corresponding to $\log(M/M_\odot h^{-1})\leq 12.3$ at a confidence of $90\%$. These constraints are broadly consistent with Alonso et al. (2018) and previous measurements by cross-correlation between DLAs and the Ly$α$ forest (e.g. Font-Ribera et al. 2012; Perez-Rafols et al. 2018). Further, our results demonstrate the potential of obtainin…
The coalescence of massive black hole binaries (with masses $10^4 - 10^7 M_{\odot}$) leads to gravitational wave emission that is detectable out to high redshifts ($z \sim 20$) with the forthcoming LISA observatory. We combine the theoretically derived merger rates for dark matter haloes at various redshifts, with an empirically motivated prescription that connects the mass of a dark matter halo and that of its central black hole. Using the expected constraints on the (chirp or reduced) masses of binary black holes, their mass ratios and redshift uncertainties, we forecast the measurement prec…
The thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect induces a Compton-$y$ distortion in cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps that is sensitive to a line of sight integral of the ionized gas pressure. By correlating the positions of galaxies with maps of the Compton-$y$ distortion, one can probe baryonic feedback processes and study the thermodynamic properties of a significant fraction of the gas in the Universe. Using a model fitting approach, we forecast how well future galaxy and CMB surveys will be able to measure these correlations, and show that powerful constraints on halo pressur…
We develop and implement two new methods for constraining the scatter in the relationship between galaxies and dark matter halos. These new techniques are sensitive to the scatter at low halo masses, making them complementary to previous constraints that are dependent on clustering amplitudes or rich galaxy groups, both of which are only sensitive to more massive halos. In both of our methods, we use a galaxy group finder to locate central galaxies in the SDSS main galaxy sample. Our first technique uses the small-scale cross-correlation of central galaxies with all lower mass galaxies. This q…
Using the self-consistent modeling of the conditional stellar mass functions across cosmic time by Yang et al. (2012), we make model predictions for the star formation histories (SFHs) of {\it central} galaxies in halos of different masses. The model requires the following two key ingredients: (i) mass assembly histories of central and satellite galaxies, and (ii) local observational constraints of the star formation rates of central galaxies as function of halo mass. We obtain a universal fitting formula that describes the (median) SFH of central galaxies as function of halo mass, galaxy stel…
Applying halo models to analyze the small-scale clustering of galaxies is a proven method for characterizing the connection between galaxies and their host halos. Such works are often plagued by systematic errors or are limited to clustering statistics which can be predicted analytically. In this work, we employ a numerical mock-based modeling procedure to examine the clustering of SDSS DR7 galaxies. We apply a standard halo occupation distribution (HOD) model to dark-matter-only simulations with a LCDM cosmology. To constrain the theoretical models, we utilize a combination of galaxy number d…
It has recently been proposed that if the Galactic dark matter halo were triaxial it would induce lumpiness in the velocity distribution of halo stars in the Solar Neighbourhood through orbital resonances. These substructures could therefore provide a way of measuring its shape. We explore the robustness of this proposal by integrating numerically orbits starting from a realistic set of initial conditions in dark halo potentials of different shape. We have analysed the resulting velocity distributions in Solar neighbourhood-like volumes, and have performed statistical tests for the presence of…
Any measurement made using an N-body simulation is subject to noise due to the finite number of particles used to sample the dark matter distribution function, and the lack of structure below the simulation resolution. This noise can be particularly significant when attempting to measure intrinsically small quantities, such as halo spin. In this work we develop a model to describe the effects of particle noise on halo spin parameters. This model is calibrated using N-body simulations in which the particle noise can be treated as a Poisson process on the underlying dark matter distribution func…
Interpreting the small-scale clustering of galaxies with halo models can elucidate the connection between galaxies and dark matter halos. Unfortunately, the modelling is typically not sufficiently accurate for ruling out models statistically. It is thus difficult to use the information encoded in small scales to test cosmological models or probe subtle features of the galaxy-halo connection. In this paper, we attempt to push halo modelling into the "accurate" regime with a fully numerical mock-based methodology and careful treatment of statistical and systematic errors. With our forward-modell…
We present constraints on the timescale of star formation variability and the correlation between star formation and host halo accretion histories of star-forming (SF) central galaxies from the scatter of the stellar-to-halo mass relation (SHMR). SF galaxies are found to have a tight relationship between their star formation rates and stellar masses on the so-called "star-forming sequence" (SFS), which characterizes their SF histories and $M_*$ growths. Meanwhile, observed SHMR constraints connect $M_*$ growth to halo accretion history. Combining these observed trends with a cosmological $N$-b…
We explore how diffuse stellar light and globular clusters (GCs) can be used to trace the matter distribution of their host halo using an observational methodology. For this, we use 117 simulated dark matter (DM) haloes from the $(34.4~\rm cMpc)^3$ periodic volume of the E-MOSAICS project. For each halo, we compare the stellar surface brightness and GC projected number density maps to the surface densities of DM and total mass. We find that the dominant structures identified in the stellar light and in the GCs correspond closely with those from the DM and total mass. Our method is unaffected b…
We study the dependence of galaxy clustering on atomic gas mass using a sample of $\sim$16,000 galaxies with redshift in the range of $0.0025<z<0.05$ and HI mass of $M_{\rm HI}>10^8M_{\odot}$, drawn from the 70% complete sample of the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA survey. We construct subsamples of galaxies with $M_{\rm HI}$ above different thresholds, and make volume-limited clustering measurements in terms of three statistics: the projected two-point correlation function, the projected cross-correlation function with respect to a reference sample selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and th…
We model the response of spherical, non-rotating Milky Way (MW) dark matter and stellar halos to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) using the matrix method of linear response theory. Our computations reproduce the main features of the dark halo response from simulations. We show that these features can be well separated by a harmonic decomposition: the large scale over/underdensity in the halo (associated with its reflex motion) corresponds to the $\ell=1$ terms, and the local overdensity to the $\ell\geq2$ multipoles. Moreover, the dark halo response is largely dominated by the first order 'for…
We use ESA/Gaia astrometry together with SEGUE and LAMOST measurements of the GD-1 stellar stream to explore the improvement on the Galactic gravitational potential that these new data provide. Assuming a realistic universal model for the dark matter halo together with reasonable models of the baryonic components, we find that the orbital solutions for GD-1 require the circular velocity at the Solar radius to be $V_{\rm circ}(R_\odot) =244 \pm 4\,{\rm km\, s^{-1}}$, and also that the density flattening of the dark halo is $q_ρ=0.82^{+0.25}_{-0.13}$. The corresponding Galactic mass within 20kpc…
We present the first detailed analysis of the connection between galaxies and their dark matter halos for the unWISE galaxy catalog -- a full-sky, infrared-selected sample built from WISE data, containing over 500 million galaxies. Using unWISE galaxy-galaxy auto-correlation and Planck CMB lensing-galaxy cross-correlation measurements down to 10 arcmin angular scales, we constrain the halo occupation distribution (HOD), a model describing how central and satellite galaxies are distributed within dark matter halos, for three unWISE} galaxy samples at mean redshifts $\bar{z} \approx 0.6$, $1.1$,…
Halo models provide a simple and computationally inexpensive way to investigate the connection between galaxies and their dark matter haloes. However, these models rely on the assumption that the role of baryons can be easily parametrized in the modelling procedure. We aim to examine the ability of halo occupation distribution (HOD) modelling to reproduce the galaxy clustering found in two different hydrodynamic simulations, Illustris and EAGLE. For each simulation, we measure several galaxy clustering statistics on two different luminosity threshold samples. We then apply a simple five parame…
We study the gravothermal evolution of dark matter halos in the presence of dissipative dark matter self-interactions. Dissipative interactions are present in many particle-physics realizations of the dark-sector paradigm and can significantly accelerate the gravothermal collapse of halos compared to purely elastic dark matter self-interactions. This is the case even when the dissipative interaction timescale is longer than the free-fall time of the halo. Using a semianalytical fluid model calibrated with isolated and cosmological $N$-body simulations, we calculate the evolution of the halo pr…
Tidal streams are a powerful probe of the Milky Way (MW) potential shape. In this paper, we introduce a simple test particle method to fit stream data, using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique to marginalise over uncertainties in the progenitor's orbit and the Milky Way halo shape parameters. Applying it to mock data of thin streams in the MW halo, we show that, even for very cold streams, stream-orbit offsets - not modelled in our simple method - introduce systematic biases in the recovered shape parameters. For the streams that we consider, and our particular choice of potential parameteri…
We investigate the use of spiral arm pitch angles as a probe of disk galaxy mass profiles. We confirm our previous result that spiral arm pitch angles (P) are well correlated with the rate of shear (S) in disk galaxy rotation curves. We use this correlation to argue that imaging data alone can provide a powerful probe of galactic mass distributions out to large look-back times. We then use a sample of 13 galaxies, with Spitzer 3.6-$μ$m imaging data and observed H$α$ rotation curves, to demonstrate how an inferred shear rate coupled with a bulge-disk decomposition model and a Tully-Fisher-deriv…
Motivated by previous findings that the magnitude gap between certain satellite galaxy and the central galaxy can be used to improve the estimation of halo mass, we carry out a systematic study of the information content of different member galaxies in the modelling of the host halo mass using a machine learning approach. We employ data from the hydrodynamical simulation IllustrisTNG and train a Random Forest (RF) algorithm to predict a halo mass from the stellar masses of its member galaxies. Exhaustive feature selection is adopted to disentangle the importances of different galaxy members. W…
We study the effect of self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) and baryons on the shape of early-type galaxies (ETGs) and their dark matter haloes, comparing them to the predictions of the cold dark matter (CDM) scenario. We use five hydrodynamical zoom-in simulations of haloes hosting ETGs ($M_{\rm vir}\sim 10^{13}M_{\odot}$ and $M_{*}\sim10^{11}M_{\odot}$), simulated in CDM and a SIDM model with constant cross-section of $σ_T/m_χ= 1\ \mathrm{cm}^2 \mathrm{g}^{-1}$. We measure the three-dimensional and projected shapes of the dark matter haloes and their baryonic content using the inertia tensor …
Many dynamical models of the Milky Way halo require assumptions that the distribution function of a tracer population should be independent of time (i.e., a steady state distribution function) and that the underlying potential is spherical. We study the limitations of such modelling by applying a general dynamical model with minimal assumptions to a large sample of galactic haloes from cosmological $N$-body and hydrodynamical simulations. Using dark matter particles as dynamical tracers, we find that the systematic uncertainties in the measured mass and concentration parameters typically have …
Recent studies have suggested that the Milky Way (MW)'s Dark Matter (DM) halo may be significantly tilted with respect to its central stellar disk, a feature that might be linked to its formation history. In this work, we demonstrate a method of constraining the orientation of the minor axis of the DM halo using the angle and frequency variables. This method is complementary to other traditional techniques, such as orbit fitting. We first test the method using a simulated tidal stream evolving in a realistic environment inside an MW-mass host from the FIRE cosmological simulation, showing that…
We investigate the connection between supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their host dark matter halos in the local universe using the clustering statistics and luminosity function of AGN from the Swift/BAT AGN Spectroscopic survey (BASS DR2). By forward-modeling AGN activity into snapshot halo catalogs from N-body simulations, we test a scenario in which SMBH mass correlates with dark matter (sub)halo mass for fixed stellar mass. We compare this to a model absent of this correlation, where stellar mass alone determines the SMBH mass. We find that while both simple models are able to largely …
The search for planets orbiting other stars has recently expanded to include stars from galaxies outside the Milky Way. With the TESS and Gaia surveys, photometric and kinematic information can be combined to identify transiting planet candidates of extragalactic origin. Here, 1,080 low-luminosity red giant branch stars observed by Gaia and TESS with kinematics suggesting a high likelihood of extragalactic origin were searched for planet transits. Transit injection-recovery tests were performed to measure the sensitivity of the TESS data and completeness of the transit search. Injected signals…
The observed surface densities of dark matter halos are known to follow a simple scaling law, ranging from dwarf galaxies to galaxy clusters, with a weak dependence on their virial mass. Here we point out that this can not only be used to provide a method to determine the standard relation between halo mass and concentration, but also to use large samples of objects in order to place constraints on dark matter self-interactions that can be more robust than constraints derived from individual objects. We demonstrate our method by considering a sample of about 50 objects distributed across the w…
We combine available constraints on the local CII 158 $μ$m line luminosity function from galaxy observations (Hemmati et al. 2017), with the evolution of the star-formation rate density and the recent CII intensity mapping measurement in Pullen et al. (2018, assuming detection), to derive the evolution of the CII luminosity - halo mass relation over $z \sim 0-6$. We develop convenient fitting forms for the evolution of the CII luminosity - halo mass relation, and forecast constraints on the CII intensity mapping power spectrum and its associated uncertainty across redshifts. We predict the sen…
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) can be scattered by ionized gas in their local environments, host galaxies, intervening galaxies along their lines-of-sight, the intergalactic medium, and the Milky Way. The relative contributions of these different media depend on their geometric configuration and the internal properties of the gas. When these relative contributions are well understood, FRB scattering is a powerful probe of density fluctuations along the line-of-sight. The precise scattering measurements for FRB 121102 and FRB 180916 allow us to place an upper limit on the amount of scattering contrib…
We compile available constraints on the carbon monoxide (CO) 1-0 luminosity functions and abundances at redshifts 0-3. This is used to develop a data driven halo model for the evolution of the CO galaxy abundances and clustering across intermediate redshifts. It is found that the recent constraints from the CO Power Spectrum Survey ($z \sim 3$; Keating et al. 2016), when combined with existing observations of local galaxies ($z \sim 0$; Keres et al. 2003), lead to predictions which are consistent with the results of smaller surveys at intermediate redshifts ($z \sim 1-2$). We provide convenien…
Context. Although a variety of techniques have been employed for determining the Milky Way dark matter halo mass distribution, the range of allowed masses spans both light and heavy values. Knowing the precise mass of our Galaxy is important for placing the Milky Way in a cosmological $Λ$CDM context. Aims. We show that hypervelocity stars (HVSs) ejected from the center of the Milky Way galaxy can be used to constrain the mass of its dark matter halo. Methods. We use the asymmetry in the radial velocity distribution of halo stars due to escaping HVSs, which depends on the halo potential (escape…
We study the vertical stellar distribution of the Milky Way thin disk in detail with particular focus on the outer disk. We treat the galactic disk as a gravitationally coupled, three-component system consisting of stars, atomic hydrogen gas, and molecular hydrogen gas in the gravitational field of the dark matter halo. The self-consistent vertical distribution for stars and gas in such a realistic system is obtained for radii between 4-22 kpc. The inclusion of an additional gravitating component constrains the vertical stellar distribution toward the mid-plane, so that the mid-plane density i…
We apply the Schwarzschild orbit superposition method to mock data in order to investigate the accuracy of recovering the profile of the orbit anisotropy. The mock data come from four numerical realizations of dark matter haloes with well defined anisotropy profiles. We show that when assuming a correct mass distribution we are able to determine the anisotropy with high precision and clearly distinguish between the models.
Jovian planet formation has been shown to be strongly correlated with host star metallicity, which is thought to be a proxy for disk solids. Observationally, previous works have indicated that jovian planets preferentially form around stars with solar and super solar metallicities. Given these findings, it is challenging to form planets within metal-poor environments, particularly for hot Jupiters that are thought to form via metallicity-dependent core accretion. Although previous studies have conducted planet searches for hot Jupiters around metal-poor stars, they have been limited due to sma…
Over the past decade, empirical constraints on the galaxy-dark matter halo connection have significantly advanced our understanding of galaxy evolution. Past techniques have focused on connections between halo properties and galaxy stellar mass and/or star formation rates. Empirical techniques in the next decade will link halo assembly histories with galaxies' circumgalactic media, supermassive black holes, morphologies, kinematics, sizes, colors, metallicities, and transient rates. Uncovering these links will resolve many critical uncertainties in galaxy formation and will enable much higher-…
Galaxies display several well-behaved scaling relations between their properties, such as the star formation rate-stellar mass relation (the main sequence) and the stellar mass-halo mass relation (SHMR). In principle, these scaling relations could imply different star formation histories (SFHs) of galaxies and different constraints on galaxy formation physics. In this paper, we derive the SFHs of galaxies by assuming that they always follow the SHMRs at different redshifts and use an empirical model to constrain key processes in their baryon cycle. It is found that, besides cold accretion due …
Understanding the galaxy-halo connection is fundamental for contemporary models of galaxy clustering. The extent to which the haloes' assembly history and environment impact galaxy clustering (a.k.a. galaxy assembly bias; GAB), remains a complex and challenging problem. Using a semi-analytic galaxy formation model, we study the individual contributions of different secondary halo properties to the GAB signal. These are obtained by comparing the clustering of stellar-mass selected samples to that of shuffled samples where the galaxies are randomly reassigned to haloes of fixed mass and a specif…
We use the kinematics of $\sim200\,000$ giant stars that lie within $\sim 1.5$ kpc of the plane to measure the vertical profile of mass density near the Sun. We find that the dark mass contained within the isodensity surface of the dark halo that passes through the Sun ($(6\pm0.9)\times10^{10}\,\mathrm{M_\odot}$), and the surface density within $0.9$ kpc of the plane ($(69\pm10)\,\mathrm{M_\odot\,pc^{-2}}$) are almost independent of the (oblate) halo's axis ratio $q$. If the halo is spherical, 46 per cent of the radial force on the Sun is provided by baryons, and only 4.3 per cent of the Galax…
The Milky Way hosts a hot ($\approx 2 \times 10^6$ K), diffuse, gaseous halo based on detections of z = 0 OVII and OVIII absorption lines in quasar spectra and emission lines in blank-sky spectra. Here we improve constraints on the structure of the hot gas halo by fitting a radial model to a much larger sample of OVII and OVIII emission line measurements from XMM-Newton EPIC-MOS spectra compared to previous studies ($\approx$ 650 sightlines). We assume a modified $β$-model for the halo density distribution and a constant-density Local Bubble from which we calculate emission to compare with the…
Recent advancements in the imaging of low-surface-brightness objects revealed numerous ultra-diffuse galaxies in the local Universe. These peculiar objects are unusually extended and faint: their effective radii are comparable to the Milky Way, but their surface brightnesses are lower than that of dwarf galaxies. Their ambiguous properties motivate two potential formation scenarios: the "failed" Milky Way and the dwarf galaxy scenario. In this paper, for the first time, we employ X-ray observations to test these formation scenarios on a sample of isolated, low-surface-brightness galaxies. Sinc…
We construct halo occupation distribution (HOD) models of high redshift ($z \gtrsim 7.5$) galaxies with $M_{*}>10^8~M_{\odot}/h$ using the BlueTides hydrodynamic simulation suite, with a particular emphasis on modelling the small scale / 1-halo clustering ($0.01\lesssim r \lesssim 1~ h^{-1}\rm{Mpc}$). Similar to low redshift studies, we find that the central and satellite mean HODs ($\left<N_{\mathrm{cen}}\right>$ and $\left<N_{\mathrm{sat}}\right>$) can be modeled by a smoothed step function and a power law respectively. The number density of satellite galaxies is however significantly suppre…
The spherical Jeans equation (SJE) is widely used in dynamical modelling of the Milky Way (MW) halo potential. We use haloes and galaxies from the cosmological Millennium-II simulation and hydrodynamical APOSTLE simulations to investigate the performance of the SJE in recovering the underlying mass profiles of MW mass haloes. The best-fitting halo mass and concentration parameters scatter by 25% and 40% around their input values, respectively, when dark matter particles are used as tracers. This scatter becomes as large as a factor of 3 when using star particles instead. This is significantly …
We estimate the Milky Way (MW) halo properties using satellite kinematic data including the latest measurements from Gaia DR2. With a simulation-based 6D phase-space distribution function (DF) of satellite kinematics, we can infer halo properties efficiently and without bias, and handle the selection function and measurement errors rigorously in the Bayesian framework. Applying our DF from the EAGLE simulation to 28 satellites, we obtain an MW halo mass of $M=1.23_{-0.18}^{+0.21}\times 10^{12} M_\odot$ and a concentration of $c=9.4_{ -2.1}^{ +2.8}$ with the prior based on the $M$-$c$ relation.…
The triggering mechanisms for Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are still debated. Some of the most popular ones include galaxy interactions (IT) and disk instabilities (DI). Using an advanced semi analytic model (SAM) of galaxy formation, coupled to accurate halo occupation distribution modeling, we investigate the imprint left by each separate triggering process on the clustering strength of AGN at small and large scales. Our main results are as follows: i) DIs, irrespective of their exact implementation in the SAM, tend to fall short in triggering AGN activity in galaxies at the center of halos …
Milky Way's hot gaseous halo extends up to the Galactic virial radius ($\sim 200$ kpc) and contains a significant component of baryon mass of the Galaxy. The halo properties can be constrained from X-ray spectroscopic observations and from satellite galaxies' ram-pressure stripping studies. Results of the former method crucially depend on the gas metallicity assumptions while the latter one's are insensitive to them. Here, a joint analysis of both kinds of data is presented to constrain electron density and metallicity of the gas. The power law is assumed for the electron density radial profil…
We employ an analytical model that incorporates both wavelength-dependent and wavelength-independent depolarization to describe radio polarimetric observations of polarization at $λλλ\, 3.5, 6.2, 20.5$ cm in M51 (NGC 5194). The aim is to constrain both the regular and turbulent magnetic field strengths in the disk and halo, modeled as a two- or three-layer magneto-ionic medium, via differential Faraday rotation and internal Faraday dispersion, along with wavelength-independent depolarization arising from turbulent magnetic fields. A reduced chi-squared analysis is used for the statistical comp…
Using hydrodynamical simulations, we study how well the underlying gravitational potential of a galaxy cluster can be modelled dynamically with different types of tracers. In order to segregate different systematics and the effects of varying estimator performances, we first focus on applying a generic minimal assumption method (oPDF) to model the simulated haloes using the full 6-D phasespace information. We show that the halo mass and concentration can be recovered in an ensemble unbiased way, with a stochastic bias that varies from halo to halo, mostly reflecting deviations from steady stat…
We present an artificial neural network design in which past and present-day properties of dark matter halos and their local environment are used to predict time-resolved star formation histories and stellar metallicity histories of central and satellite galaxies. Using data from the IllustrisTNG simulations, we train a TensorFlow-based neural network with two inputs: a standard layer with static properties of the dark matter halo, such as halo mass and starting time; and a recurrent layer with variables such as overdensity and halo mass accretion rate, evaluated at multiple time steps from $0…