MEGA: Merger graphs of structure formation

Abstract

When following the growth of structure in the Universe, we propose replacing merger trees with merger graphs, in which haloes can both merge and split into separate pieces. We show that this leads to smoother mass growth and eliminates catastrophic failures in which massive haloes have no progenitors or descendants. For those who prefer to stick with merger trees, we find that trees derived from our merger graphs have similar mass growth properties to previous methods, but again without catastrophic failures. For future galaxy formation modelling, two different density thresholds can be used to distinguish host haloes (extended galactic haloes, groups and clusters) from higher-density subhaloes: sites of galaxy formation.

References in corpus (22)

• Seven-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Interpretation
• The cosmological simulation code GADGET-2
• Simulating the joint evolution of quasars, galaxies and their large-scale distribution
• Populating a cluster of galaxies - I. Results at z=0
• The Rockstar Phase-Space Temporal Halo Finder and the Velocity Offsets of Cluster Cores
• Ahf: Amiga's Halo Finder
• The merger rate of galaxies in the Illustris Simulation: a comparison with observations and semi-empirical models
• Gravitationally Consistent Halo Catalogs and Merger Trees for Precision Cosmology
• The evolution substructure I: a new identification method
• Haloes gone MAD: The Halo-Finder Comparison Project
• Building Merger Trees from Cosmological N-body Simulations
• N-body Dark Matter Haloes with simple Hierarchical Histories
• The overdensity and masses of the friends-of-friends halos and universality of the halo mass function
• HBT+: an improved code for finding subhalos and building merger trees in cosmological simulations
• Resolving Subhaloes' Lives with the Hierarchical Bound-Tracing Algorithm
• L-GALAXIES 2020: Spatially resolved cold gas phases, star formation and chemical enrichment in galactic discs
• Sussing Merger Trees: The Merger Trees Comparison Project
• Hunting for Galaxies and Halos in simulations with VELOCIraptor
• Sussing Merger Trees: the influence of the halo finder
• Climbing Halo Merger Trees with TreeFrog
• Effects of large-scale environment on the assembly history of central galaxies
• Sussing Merger Trees: A proposed Merger Tree data format

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Impact of Dust on the Sizes of Galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization
• Constructing high-fidelity halo merger trees in AbacusSummit
• Massive galaxy formation caught in action at z~5 with JWST
• The Relevance of Dynamical Friction for the MW/LMC/SMC Triple System
• Exploring the effect of baryons on the radial distribution of satellite galaxies with GAMA and IllustrisTNG