Relating galaxies across different redshift to study galaxy evolution

Abstract

We propose a general framework leveraging the halo-galaxy connection to link galaxies observed at different redshift in a statistical way, and use the link to infer the redshift evolution of the galaxy population. Our tests based on hydrodynamic simulations show that our method can accurately recover the stellar mass assembly histories up to $z\sim 3$ for present star-forming and quiescent galaxies down to $10^{10}{h}^{-1}{M}_{\odot }$. Applying the method to observational data shows that the stellar mass evolution of the main progenitors of galaxies depends strongly on the properties of descendants, such as stellar mass, halo mass, and star formation states. Galaxies hosted by low-mass groups/halos at the present time have since $z\sim 1.8$ grown their stellar mass $\sim 2.5$ times as fast as those hosted by massive clusters. This dependence on host halo mass becomes much weaker for descendant galaxies with similar star formation states. Star-forming galaxies grow about 2-4 times faster than their quiescent counterparts since $z\sim 1.8$. Both TNG and EAGLE simulations over-predict the progenitor stellar mass at $z>1$, particularly for low-mass descendants.

16 pages, 10+4 figures, published on MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Massive Dark Matter Halos at High Redshift: Implications for Observations in the JWST Era
• Dissect two-halo galactic conformity effect for central galaxies: The dependence of star formation activities on the large-scale environment
• Late-formed halos prefer to host quiescent central galaxies. I. Observational results
• Testing galaxy formation models with the stellar mass-halo mass relations for star-forming and quiescent galaxies
• A Conditional Abundance Matching Method of Extending Simulated Halo Merger Trees to Resolve Low-Mass Progenitors and Sub-halos