paper

Gravity at Work: How the Build-Up of Environments Shape Galaxy Properties

arXiv:1101.2062 · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-20285-8_50

Abstract

We present results on the heating of the inter-cluster medium (ICM) by gravitational potential energy from in-falling satellites. We calculate the available excess energy of baryons once they are stripped from their satellite and added to the ICM of the hosting environment. this excess energy is a strong function of environment and we find that it can exceed the contribution from AGNs or supernovae (SN) by up to two orders of magnitude in the densest environments/haloes. Cooling by radiative losses is in general fully compensated by gravitational heating in massive groups and clusters with hot gas temperature > 1 keV. The reason for the strong environment dependence is the continued infall of substructure onto dense environments during their formation in contrast to field-like environments. We show that gravitational heating is able to reduce the number of too luminous galaxies in models and to produce model luminosity functions in agreement with observations.

8 pages, 3 figures. To be published in Proceedings of JENAM 2010, Symposium 2: "Environment and the formation of galaxies: 30 years later"

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