The scale dependence of mass assembly in galaxies

Abstract

We compare the results of the mark correlation analysis of galaxies in a sample from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and from two galaxy catalogs obtained by semi-analytical galaxy formation models implemented on the Millennium Simulation. We use the MOPED method to retrieve the star formation history of observed galaxies and use star formation parameters as weights to the mark correlations. We find an excellent match between models and observations when the mark correlations use stellar mass and luminosity as weights. The most remarkable result is related to the mark correlations associated to the evolution of mass assembly through star formation in galaxies, where we find that semi-analytical models are able to reproduce the main trends seen in the observational data. In addition, we find a good agreement between the redshift evolution of the mean total mass formed by star formation predicted by the models and that measured by MOPED. Our results show that close galaxy pairs today formed more stellar mass ~10 Gyr ago than the average, while more recently this trend is the opposite, with close pairs showing low levels of star formation activity. We also show a strong correlation in simulations between the shape and time evolution of the star formation marks and the number of major mergers experienced by galaxies, which drive the environmental dependence in galaxy formation by regulating the star formation process.

4 pages, 4 figures, final version accepted for publication in ApJ Letters

References in corpus (27)

• Stellar population synthesis at the resolution of 2003
• Galactic Stellar and Substellar Initial Mass Function
• Simulating the joint evolution of quasars, galaxies and their large-scale distribution
• The many lives of active galactic nuclei: cooling flows, black holes and the luminosities and colours of galaxies
• Populating a cluster of galaxies - I. Results at z=0
• The broken hierarchy of galaxy formation
• Hierarchical Galaxy Formation
• The hierarchical formation of the brightest cluster galaxies
• New Insight on Galaxy Formation and Evolution from Keck Spectroscopy of the Hawaii Deep Fields
• The formation history of elliptical galaxies
• What Shapes the Luminosity Function of Galaxies?
• The age dependence of halo clustering
• The Mass Assembly History of Field Galaxies: Detection of an Evolving Mass Limit for Star Forming Galaxies
• The Complete Star Formation History of the Universe
• The star formation histories of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• On the onset of galactic winds in quiescent star forming galaxies
• Analysis of Systematic Effects and Statistical Uncertainties in Angular Clustering of Galaxies from Early SDSS Data
• A marked correlation function analysis of halo formation times in the Millennium Simulation
• Bursting and Quenching in Massive Galaxies without Major Mergers or AGNs
• Gravitational Quenching in Massive Galaxies and Clusters by Clumpy Accretion
• The Luminosity-Weighted or `Marked' Correlation Function
• The Dependence of the Mass Assembly History of Cold Dark Matter Halos on Environment
• Uncovering the chemical enrichment and mass-assembly histories of star-forming galaxies
• Cosmology and the Halo Occupation Distribution from Small-Scale Galaxy Clustering in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The assembly bias of dark matter haloes to higher orders
• Environment and the cosmic evolution of star formation
• Semi-empirical analysis of Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies: IV. A nature via nurture scenario for galaxy evolution

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Tracking the impact of environment on the Galaxy Stellar Mass Function up to z~1 in the 10k zCOSMOS sample
• Galaxy Zoo: The Environmental Dependence of Bars and Bulges in Disc Galaxies
• Non-Gaussian halo assembly bias
• Compact groups from the Millennium Simulations: I. Their Nature and the completeness of the Hickson sample
• The role of spin in the formation and evolution of galaxies
• A Halo Model with Environment Dependence: Theoretical Considerations
• A Comparison of Galaxy Group Luminosity Functions from Semi-Analytic Models
• Does stellar mass assembly history vary with environment?