Simulation-guided galaxy evolution inference: A case study with strong lensing galaxies

Abstract

Understanding the evolution of galaxies provides crucial insights into a broad range of aspects in astrophysics, including structure formation and growth, the nature of dark energy and dark matter, baryonic physics, and more. It is, however, infeasible to track the evolutionary processes of individual galaxies in real time given their long timescales. As a result, galaxy evolution analyses have been mostly based on ensembles of galaxies that are supposed to be from the same population according to usually basic and crude observational criteria. We propose a new strategy of evaluating the evolution of an individual galaxy by identifying its descendant galaxies as guided by cosmological simulations. As a proof of concept, we examined the evolution of the total mass distribution of a target strong lensing galaxy at $z=0.884$ using the proposed strategy. We selected 158 galaxies from the IllustrisTNG300 simulation that we identified as analogs of the target galaxy. We followed their descendants and found 11 observed strong lensing galaxies that match in stellar mass and size with the descendants at their redshifts. The observed and simulated results are discussed, although no conclusive assessment is made given the low statistical significance due to the small sample size. Nevertheless, the test confirms that our proposed strategy is already feasible with existing data and simulations. We expect it to play an even more important role in studying galaxy evolution as more strong lens systems and larger simulations become available with the advent of next-generation survey programs and cosmological simulations.

11 pages

References in corpus (12)

• The Size Evolution of Star-forming and Quenched Galaxies in the IllustrisTNG simulation
• Galactic Angular Momentum in the Illustris Simulation: Feedback and the Hubble Sequence
• The SL2S Galaxy-scale Lens Sample. V. Dark Matter Halos and Stellar IMF of Massive Early-type Galaxies out to Redshift 0.8
• The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. XIII. Discovery of 40 New Galaxy-Scale Strong Lenses
• Small scatter and nearly-isothermal mass profiles to four half-light radii from two-dimensional stellar dynamics of early-type galaxies
• The BOSS Emission-Line Lens Survey. IV. : Smooth Lens Models for the BELLS GALLERY Sample
• Stellar populations and evolution of early-type cluster galaxies: Constraints from optical imaging and spectroscopy of z=0.5-0.9 galaxy clusters
• HOLISMOKES. VI. New galaxy-scale strong lens candidates from the HSC-SSP imaging survey
• HOLISMOKES. VIII. High-redshift, strong-lens search in the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program
• CHITAH: Strong-gravitational-lens hunter in imaging surveys
• Up to 100,000 reliable strong gravitational lenses in future dark energy experiments
• Early-type galaxy density profiles from IllustrisTNG: II. Evolutionary trend of the total density profile