Characterizing simulated galaxy stellar mass histories

Cohn, J. D. and van de Voort, Freeke ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6301-638X 2015. Characterizing simulated galaxy stellar mass histories. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 446 (4) , pp. 3253-3267. 10.1093/mnras/stu2332

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Abstract

Cosmological galaxy formation simulations can now produce rich and diverse ensembles of galaxy histories. These simulated galaxy histories, taken all together, provide an answer to the question ‘How do galaxies form?’ for the models used to construct them. We characterize such galaxy history ensembles both to understand their properties and to identify points of comparison for histories within a given galaxy formation model or between different galaxy formation models and simulations. We focus primarily on stellar mass histories of galaxies with the same final stellar mass, for six final stellar mass values and for three different simulated galaxy formation models (a semi-analytic model built upon the dark matter Millennium simulation and two models from the hydrodynamical OverWhelmingly Large Simulations project). Using principal component analysis (PCA) to classify scatter around the average stellar mass history, we find that one fluctuation dominates for all sets of histories we consider, although its shape and contribution can vary between samples. We correlate the PCA characterization with several z = 0 galaxy properties (to connect with survey observables) and also compare it to some other galaxy history properties. We then explore separating galaxy stellar mass histories into classes, using the largest PCA contribution, k-means clustering, and simple Gaussian mixture models. For three component models, these different methods often gave similar results. These history classification methods provide a succinct and often quick way to characterize changes in the full ensemble of histories of a simulated population as physical assumptions are varied, to compare histories of different simulated populations to each other, and to assess the relation of simulated histories to fixed time observations.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Physics and Astronomy
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0035-8711
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 March 2020
Date of Acceptance:	1 November 2014
Last Modified:	06 May 2023 03:40
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/130256

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